


There Is Another

by crossingwinter



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Multi, Rey Is Twins
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-13
Updated: 2019-12-14
Packaged: 2020-10-17 19:20:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 14
Words: 78,653
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20626217
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crossingwinter/pseuds/crossingwinter
Summary: “Mission success?”“You will be interested in this.”“Oh?”Kylo glances back over his shoulder.  The girl he had found on Takodana is still deeply unconscious, and will remain so for a long while.  He had knocked her out as deeply as he could.  She had fired at him the moment she’d seen him, resisted him tooth and nail.  He does not want her waking up until he has her properly restrained, and he had not come to Takodana prepared to take any prisoners.A shiver runs up his spine as he tries to shove away how it had felt, carrying her through that forest.“Yes.”“How so?”The trouble with helmets is he can’t look Kira dead in the eye anymore.  He can’t watch her face closely to see what will happen when he tells her,“She’s you.”





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [diasterisms](https://archiveofourown.org/users/diasterisms/gifts).

> Many many thanks to: 
> 
> \-- diasterisms for getting me excited about this concept over a year ago so that it was always a "back of the brain" idea for a good long chunk of time  
\-- aionimica for letting me scream for 1919309140913981742 years at her every time the plot ended up being more than I could fucking manage (why do plots exist? I vote they don’t anymore.)  
\-- kiddohah who made [the art](https://shmisolo.tumblr.com/post/171188166245/kiddohah-darkrey-rey-reylo-kyloren) that popped the idea in my head to begin with  
\-- the EPIX cast and crew for hyping me up with a teaser trailer so that I said fuck it, let’s do it live and started writing the thing  
\-- and always, eternally, stormdancer, for letting me roll around and moan at her while I got stuck with the plot. 
> 
> The chapter count might go up. I'm still editing and adjusting later parts of the fic, but was too excited to wait to be done to post. I don't think the rating will go up at this point so fair and due warning about that.

**Kylo**

“Mission success?”

“You will be interested in this.”

“Oh?”

Kylo glances back over his shoulder. The girl he had found on Takodana is still deeply unconscious, and will remain so for a long while. He had knocked her out as deeply as he could. She had fired at him the moment she’d seen him, resisted him tooth and nail. He does not want her waking up until he has her properly restrained, and he had not come to Takodana prepared to take any prisoners. 

A shiver runs up his spine as he tries to shove away how it had felt, carrying her through that forest.

“Yes.”

“How so?”

The trouble with helmets is he can’t look Kira dead in the eye anymore. He can’t watch her face closely to see what will happen when he tells her,

“She’s you.”

**Kira**

Kira Ren sits there for a long while after Kylo vanishes from the holo. 

Her throat is dry, her mind can’t focus. 

She never has trouble focusing.

_She’s you,_ Kylo had said only moments before. 

At Luke’s Praxeum, it had not been abnormal for the students to play pranks on one another. It was a natural result of putting too many children in the same place at the same time—especially clever children who were all trying to one-up one another.

Ben Solo had never once pulled a prank on her. He had never lied to her, had never tried to trick her, had never wanted to laugh at her. 

So what the kriff was this? _She’s you._

Kira closes her eyes and takes a deep steadying breath. 

_Breathe. Search your feelings._

_Kriff off, Master Luke._

Her hand tightens into a fist.

She reaches back into the memories, the time before, the ones that she doesn’t let herself think about.

There had been another girl—a clone. 

Her parents had left her behind. She hadn’t been a good copy. Kira had missed her but no matter how hard she’d cried, her parents wouldn’t turn back for her. 

That doesn’t make sense, though.

Why would you spend all that money on a clone only to leave it behind?

But her parents had never made sense. 

They had left her behind too, after all. 

She grimaces and takes off her helmet, reaching for a painkiller. Her head has started to hurt and she wants to find Kylo when he lands.

She feels Kylo land through the Force some time later, a slight tremor in her awareness. 

That is when she gets up from where she’s seated. The painkillers aren’t working quickly enough, and her head is still throbbing a little bit when she moves. She can feel her heart beating in her skull. 

She finds him in the hangar, coming out of his shuttle.

“Where was she?” Kira asks smoothly.

“Hello to you too,” Kylo replies. There is something weird in his voice. If she didn’t know him, she’d almost think it was sardonic.

“Where was she?”

“On Takodana, with the droid,” he replies. Takodana. How did it get to Takodana? Unless it was clever the way that Veesh was. Veesh is too clever for his own good sometimes. Perhaps that’s a trait in clones—resilience. “She saw the map but—”

“Was she alone? Who was she with?” _My parents. Was she with my parents? Did they bring her back and replace me?_

“My father and the deserter—FN-2187.”

Kira clenches her jaw. That wasn’t the answer she was anticipating. Her heart continues to pound in her head. It makes it hard to think straight. It’s like her brain won’t let her—

“Unexpected,” she says through gritted teeth.

Kylo cocks his head and looks at her. She can’t see his eyes through his mask, but she can tell he is giving her a look. 

“Indeed,” he replies. 

“I want to see her,” Kira says and she boards his shuttle without waiting for permission. Master of the Knights of Ren was a title, and an honor, and all that, but she had known Kylo too long to ask or wait for permission. How many times had he told her that he prized her for her intuition, anyway? And her intuition, right now, is telling her that she needs to see—

Kira freezes in the doorway to the back chamber, with its fine leather seats and soft lighting. She has been placed on a bench, her head lolling to one side and her face…

It’s looking in a mirror. 

Only tanner.

Kira crouches down, taking in everything—the shape of her nose, the curve of her lips. She is sure that if she were to open her eyes, they would have the same flecked-hazel. 

“It’s a fine copy,” she says at last, standing. 

_Come back! _she hears someone scream. Her head throbs particularly intensely. 

“What?” Kylo asks sharply. His mask distorts his voice. That’s another thing she doesn’t like about it. But she knows him well enough to hear what she needs to hear.

“I’d like to interrogate her,” Kira continues as though he hadn’t said anything at all. He doesn’t understand but he doesn’t need to understand. There’s nothing _to_ understand. Her parents had made a copy of her, but it hadn’t been good enough, so they’d left it behind. And now here it is. That’s all.

“There’s no need to be concerned,” she lies smoothly.

“There isn’t?” He does not sound convinced.

“No,” she says. “I would like to interrogate her. I would like to learn who she is, where she’s—” It was so hot. So very hot, and her father hits her for crying as they fly away. The memory stings worse than the slap, and it’s a stabbing pain this time, the pain in her head. “—from.”

Kylo’s hand comes out to rest on her shoulder, but Kira shrugs him off. She’s not some little girl who refuses to cry because her parents left her behind anymore. She doesn’t need _comfort_ right now—she needs answers.

She turns to face the copy again. It’s as easy as lifting a pebble, raising her off the bench and bringing her off the shuttle, towards the interrogation sector.

**Kylo**

It takes Kylo all of four seconds to shake off the sense of unease he feels watching Kira take the girl. “I will need to interrogate her,” Kylo calls after her, his mind catching up to him through the sheer unexpectedness of all this. “The map to Skywalker.”

“I can get it from her,” Kira says. “You’ve had a long day, old man.”

If they were still children on Yavin IV, he would have pinched her, or elbowed her, or told her that one day she would learn to respect her elders. Instead, he says, “And Snoke will want that information directly.”

“Yes, sir,” Kira shrugs. “You can have at when I’m done. I won’t take long.”

“You won’t?”

“No,” Kira promises. “She’s a copy. It should take me no time to gather the necessary information from her mind.” Again, saying she’s a copy. What is she playing at with that? Surely she can sense as clearly as he can that the girl’s Force signature isn’t that of a clone.

Something weird’s going on. Kira’s always been a good liar but this—this is delusional. 

“And what information is that, precisely?”

Kira doesn’t reply and he can’t for the life of him tell if it’s because she doesn’t know, or because she, like him, is still reeling from the vision of herself floating before them—identical in every way, including her kriffing hairstyle—save for the clothing.

“I won’t take long,” Kira says again when they reach the interrogation room.

“I’ll be outside if you need me,” he blurts out.

For a moment, he half-expects Kira to laugh, or perhaps to reply—sharply—_I haven’t needed your help since I was twelve, thank you very much. _

But instead he gets another blank gaze from another blank mask.

The doors hiss shut between them and he stands there.

For one long moment, he considers listening in. Curiosity burns within him.

But she is his deputy, his lieutenant, his right hand, and _something _is going on that he doesn’t understand because Kira’s a good liar, but she’s not _stupid_. 

But he is not his uncle. 

Kira had chosen him that horrible night.

He will not violate that trust.

**Rey**

Before Rey opens her eyes, she knows she is not alone. 

The thing about constantly being alone when you wake is that you can sense it when you’re not by yourself.

Her hands are bound, and she is fastened at an angle to something by her arms and legs. Even without opening her eyes, she knows that there’s no amount of struggling that will get her out of this.

She remembers him stalking towards her, swinging that bleeding saber and blocking her every shot as though he were lazily swatting sandflies away. But she will not be afraid. Not now. Whatever there is to come, it can’t be worse than the four days she ran out of rations because Plutt was being stingy on portions. And if she is here, alone, that means the others are hopefully safe. He had ordered his men retreat before she’d lost consciousness. Finn can be on his way to the Outer Reaches the way he’d wanted. Even if it had hurt that he’d just wanted to leave like that, she can hardly blame him for it right now. If anything, she wishes she were right there with him.

She opens her eyes.

She was right: she is not alone. But it is not the beast from the forest that stands before her, looming like a nightmare. This one is also masked—humanoid—in a similar thick, dark cowl as the one from Takodana. Shorter, though. 

“Who are you?” The voice—though distorted by the mask—seems female. Rey doesn’t reply. “Or are you too stupid to talk? Is that why they got rid of you?”

_Too smart to talk, more likely_. She knows better than to just start singing a song. 

“Certainly not as smart as you think you are,” she says.

“Who are you? I won’t ask nicely again,” the masked woman says. 

“I’m nobody.” That’s what she’d told Maz Kanata. And it’s the truth—no matter what that lightsaber had made her think, made her see when she’d touched it. 

Her head hurts. There’s a faint buzzing in her ears, something familiar and warm at the edge of her awareness. 

_Come back! _

_Quiet girl._

_The map. You’ve seen it. _

And the feeling as though her brain is twisting in her skull. But her brain hadn’t twisted this time.

The woman in the mask inhales sharply and her hand balls in a fist. “Smart enough to think of lies to confuse me, too. Did you lie to Kylo when he said you’d seen the map?” The question comes out quickly, a little higher pitched than the first ones, as though she is panicking. It’s odd—from the tone of her voice, the woman seems more frightened of Rey than Rey is of her. A strange, small comfort, given everything.

“I’m not telling you anything,” Rey says. “You don’t frighten me.”

“Don’t I?” the woman asks and she raises her hands to her helmet. A mechanism releases, she pulls it forward, and—

Rey’s mouth goes dry.

And the woman smiles.

“There it is,” she says with Rey’s voice, with Rey’s lips. She takes a step closer to where Rey is strapped to the interrogation table. “So I’ll ask you again. Who are you?”

But Rey’s mind is blank, empty as the windswept sands. And her head is hurting.

“No,” she mutters. “No, I—”

“Did they make a second copy, if the first was faulty? After they gave me away?” She laughs, but it doesn’t sound like she finds it funny at all. If anything, it sounds like she’s crying without tears. “They wouldn’t have had the money for it. That’s what never made sense—why would they spend all that money on a first copy if they were only going to throw it away like garbage? So it must have been someone else.” She picks at a loose thread on her cowl, and Rey tries, tries, tries to make saliva pool in her mouth again, to swallow down her throat and make it less dry but all she can see is those three little knots on the back of the other’s head.

_You’re pulling my hair!_

_Sit still if you didn’t stop moving_—

_I’m not moving! You’re pulling my hair!_

_I am not, shut up._

_Mom! Mom! Kira’s pulling my hair!_

“Kira?” Rey breathes and there are tears in her eyes and it feels like her head is splitting open and Kira looks winded and then Rey loses consciousness to the sound of a door hissing open.

**Kylo**

“What’s wrong?” Kylo asks the moment that Kira emerges but she doesn’t reply. She just bursts past him, her helmet off, her Force signature uncharacteristically frantic, ready to run, ready to scream, ready to—

“Ren,” Kylo barks and he sends his Force signature curling around, holding her in place. Not very strongly—just enough to make her stop, not enough to make her stay.

She whirls.

“Switch off,” she hisses at him. Her eyes are bright with fury, her cheeks are flushed, and she looks the same way she looked her first night at Luke’s Praxeum—like she was too angry to cry, but the tears were putting in a strong effort.

It guts him.

But he also knows her well enough to know that if he tries—even a little—to make her soften…

“Your helmet,” he tells her.

She looks down at her hand. Then she puts it on again, her features disappearing behind metal and glass. 

“She’s a good copy,” Kira says. “Whoever made her was good.”

“You think she’s—”

“A clone.”

“Kira—”

“A very good one.”

“Listen, little liar—”

“Don’t _call me that_,” snaps Kira, flaring at once. “I’m not a child anymore. I don’t lie. Do you think if I had a twin, I’d forget it? It’s not like I was separated at birth to hide me from Vader.” It stings more than it should, because she of all people knows how much that lie had hurt him in the end. Not that it matters now. He’d learned the truth in the end, and taken up the mantle of his destiny accordingly. 

“Then why are you running from her?” he asks, as calmly as he can. 

“I’m _not_ running from her.” She sounds like she’s sobbing beneath her mask. It sounds so strange through the voice distorters. 

Kylo raises his eyebrows before remembering that Kira can’t see them. But it’s like she knows all the same because she sighs and turns away from him again.

“She’s all yours,” Kira says, before marching away, her hands balled into fists.

**Rey**

Rey is not alone—again—when she wakes this time, but it’s not Kira this time. Her head is hurting, her heart is confused, and when she opens her eyes, she just feels weary when she sees him crouching there, watching her.

He doesn’t speak first, the way that Kira had.

“Where am I?” Rey asks him. “And where’s Kira?”

He pauses for a long moment. “You’re my guest.”

Something about the way he says it makes her remember through the haze of confusion about _her_—“Where are the others?”

“You mean the murderers, traitors and thieves you call friends?” Rey stares at him. The feels rich coming from a man who had abducted her out of a forest and had sent soldiers after them, but she’s grateful all the same. It is helping take her away from the piercing pain in her head right now. “You'll be relieved to hear that I have no idea.” He’d pulled the division out—did that mean he’d left them alive?

And white hot rage flares within her. How casually he had treated them all, the destruction he had wrought and all for what? If he’d hurt a hair on Finn’s head—

“You still want to kill me.” A statement, not a question.

“That happens when you're being hunted by a creature in a mask,” Rey spits at him.

The man stops, considers and then, for the second time, her interrogator unlatches their mask and removes it.

He is not what she’d expected—though to be fair she hadn’t really known what she’d expected. Someone older, perhaps. Scarred and cruel, maybe, with weatherworn, leathered skin like the other scavengers on Jakku.

But no—his face is long, and thin, his lips are full and red, his hair is dark and oddly soft looking. But most importantly, he’s young. Older than Rey, but young all the same. 

“Tell me about the droid,” he says—a command, not a question. His voice is rich and low when it’s not being distorted by the mask he’s now set down on a shelf. He gives her a look and sighs and she watches his whole body seem to relax as he leans back against the shelf. “Come on,” he says, oddly familiar with her, oddly informal for what Rey can only presume is about to be a lengthy interrogation. “Don’t make me have to put up with your stubbornness too. One of you, I can handle, but both of you—”

“Where is she?” Rey demands at once. “And how did you—did she—”

“Tell me about the droid,” he repeats steadily.

And this time, Rey doesn’t hesitate. “He's a BB unit with a selenium drive and a thermal hyperscan vindicator—” but the man cuts her off with an almost impatient huff. 

“He’s carrying a section of a navigational chart. We have the rest. One of my knights recovered it from the archives of the Empire. We need the last piece, and somehow, you convinced the droid to show it to you.”

“Yeah, well,” Rey mutters. “I told you what I know. I can’t very well describe the map, can I?”

He takes a step closer to her, holding up a hand. “You know I can take whatever I want.”

“Kira,” she blurts out. “Where did she go? Why is she—how did she—?”

But he is holding up his hand to her face now and Rey recoils, remembering the last time, except this time his hand doesn’t stopping inches from her skin. The leather touches her face and it’s like all air has left her lungs. There’s something familiar about his touch, and something maddening. It frightens her, but she refuses to be frightened.

His eyes flicker for just a moment before his face goes smooth again. Then he holds up his hand once more and there it is—that stomach curling, brain twisting experience she’d felt in the woods. She squeezes her eyes shut, but it doesn’t stop the visions from piercing through her.

“You’re so lonely, so afraid to leave,” he tells her. _ Come back! _and her thin arms wrapped around her knees as she falls asleep at night. _Did they love Kira more than me?_ She tries to cry, because crying makes her tired, and if she’s tired, then she can sleep that’s always how it was after daddy hit her, but sleep doesn’t come easily. Sleep never comes easily. Not then, not later when she’s hungry so hungry and so alone that she’s forgotten what it feels like not to be alone. “At night, desperate to sleep. You imagine an ocean. I see it.” Rey sees it too, that endless sea—water that stretches out the way the sands of Jakku do, both ready to drown her. “I see the island…”

There are tears on her face. Her eyes are shut, but they’re leaking out. She can’t watch him as he does this. It’s worse, somehow, that he’s unmasked. That he’s human. 

“And Han Solo. You feel like he’s the father you never had.” A snort. “He would have disappointed you.”

“Get out of my head,” Rey manages to bite out, her eyes snapping open but it just makes him lean closer. 

“I know you’ve seen the map. It’s in there. And now you’ll give it to me.”

“I told you—I can’t describe it—why do you have to—”

“This is better. This way I’ll see it too. Don’t worry.” Is he trying to be kind, with that smile? Or is he just thinking of Kira? “I feel it too.”

“You feel like your head and heart are getting ripped open?” Rey snaps at him.

“That’s not what I—”

Defiance flares. Anger. How dare he call her a guest, and act as though he’s treating her well when he’s just doing this?

“I’m not giving you anything,” she grits out. 

He smirks at her. “We’ll see.”

His gaze blazes, and Rey knows one thing. The sands of Jakku didn’t crush her. She didn’t lose herself to sandstorms, or dehydration, or starvation. Oh, there were near misses. But whatever he’s throwing at her—she’s stronger than it. She knows it. 

And she watches his confidence begin to melt away. She can see him—feel him—re-exerting himself, this strange tickling sensation around her—warm and soft but the sort of warm and soft that’s too light and so it makes you laugh and convulse. She takes heart in it. _Oh you can take what you want, can you?_

And she flares like the sun and just like that—

_(A smooth voice.) Be strong. He was strong. (A laugh that crackles like lightning.)_

_Han, won’t you listen for one second? I don’t care if you think it’s mumbo jumbo, the last time I felt a presence as dark as that was when Vader_—_when he_—_Luke will keep him safe. (The boy slips back to his bed, knowing his parents didn’t hear him. Do they think he’s as evil as Darth Vader? Is that why they want to send him away?)_

_A gift for you, a token of my appreciation. (A melted helmet.)_

_(Tired now. When did his uncle start sounding old?) Your anger makes you weak, Ben. _

_Skywalker would make you weak. And for what? _

“You—you’re afraid,” Rey whispers to him and in that moment, he does look afraid. “That you will never be as strong as Darth Vader!”

He withdraws his hand and the moment is gone, the briefest insight into his mind is gone and he’s throwing himself towards the door.

“No,” Rey shouts at him and he freezes. “Kira. You promised—”

“I didn’t promise you anything,” he snaps at her and he’s gone.

**Kylo**

Kylo’s heart is pounding in his chest.

He can’t say he’s surprised—that Kira’s sister would match her in strength.

What does surprise him is that—without a lick of training—she had managed to do that.

There’s a cold sweat on his spine. 

We need to train her, is all he can think. He’s sure that Snoke will approve it—he’s seen what a force Kira is. To have two of her would delight him.

He sighs. 

It would not delight Kira, if her reactions today were anything to go by. Little liar. Ben had called her that when she’d said her parents didn’t love her, that they didn’t care about her and that’s why she was there. Maybe she’d had the right of it after all. Maybe he’d been the liar, thinking his parents had sent him away because they cared. 

Regardless: Kira was going to have to handle her emotions. 

_Hypocrite_. Her voice floats unbidden across his mind and it takes him a moment to realize she’s not talking to him, it’s just his own subconscious. He brushes it away. Luke tried to murder him—he is entitled to his wrath. 

As far as he could tell, Kira and Rey…

_You need to keep talking to her_, he tells Kira through the Force.

_Kriff off._

_That’s an order. Or would you rather have it from Snoke once he’s agreed to let me train her._

_Train her in what?_

_She’s powerful with the Force, just like you. So whatever it is that hurts, figure it out._

_Hypocrite._

This time, it really is Kira telling him that.

But when she switches off, he knows that she’s going. 

He is halfway to his audience with Snoke when he realizes he’d left his helmet with Rey.

**Kira**

Kira’s helmet is still in place when she strides into the interrogation room again. Her—the clone—her—she turns to look at her when she enters.

“Take it off,” Rey tells her.

“You’re the one in cuffs, not me,” Kira replies, forcing herself to remain calm. 

“Please, Kira—I want to see your face.”

She stands there, still as stone, staring at the copy. “Where were you?”

“Jakku,” she replies immediately, hungrily. 

Yes, Jakku. Kira remembers it distantly. Too hot, but they’d spent some years there before flying away. She tries not to think of it much. For some reason, when she thinks of it, she always gets a headache—a worse headache than the ones she gets when someone makes her think of her father. “Where were you?” the other asks.

“Yavin,” Kira replies. “They gave me to Luke Skywalker.”

The other’s eyes go as wide as bowls. “You trained with Luke Skywalker? Is that why you’re trying to find him?”

“Yes,” Kira replies, her hand tightening. She still remembers the look on Kylo’s face after his hut had collapsed. He looked like a monster, like a shadow, like a frightened boy. _I’ll protect you_, she’s thought fiercely, because he’d always protected her. “We have unfinished business with him.”

The other’s eyes flicker. “You mean to kill him?”

“He’d kill us if given the chance,” Kira replies easily. She cocks her head. “Does that shock you? Frighten you?”

“What did you do to make Luke Skywalker want to kill you?”

“All Kylo had to do was dream, apparently.”

“Kylo…” The other’s voice trails away. “You mean _him_.”

“The one who brought you in? Yes.”

The other swallows. “So you’re—” She looks down, suddenly sad.

“He’s my brother,” Kira says and the other looks up sharply. “Oh, not like that. His parents aren’t mine. But it turns out when your family doesn’t want you anymore, sometimes you end up making your own.”

The other looks even sadder at those words. But she lifts her gaze to Kira again, her eyes firm. “I wanted you,” she says. 

And Kira can’t breathe again. 

_I wanted you._

Three little words and there are tears in her eyes and she does not cry. She has not cried since she was a stupid little girl, and she won’t cry now, not for this clone who wears her face, not for this copy of her who thinks she’s—she’s—

“So I take it you don’t want me now, then?” Kira asks before she can stop the words from spilling out of her mouth. “You’d prefer the traitors you found to—”

“Are you going to unlock me?” the other demands.

“Not until given leave by Kylo or Snoke.”

“Then maybe I’m choosing my own family too.”

“A smuggler and a fugitive stormtrooper? Both of whom will be dead before long? Good choice.”

“As opposed to what? A sister who’d keep me in chains?”

“He wants to train you. Kylo,” Kira says. “You’d be lucky to have him as family like I do.”

“So very lucky,” the other spits back at her, rage swirling on her face. “A creature who twists my mind in his hands, and leaves me to pick up the wreckage?”

“Funny. You just described Master Luke,” Kira says sweetly. 

“Liar,” Rey snarls.

“I’m not a liar,” Kira retorts.

“You are and you always have been.”

“There’s a difference between calling Luke Skywalker a murderer and stealing your toys, Rey,” Kira snaps and everything falls apart.

The headache vanishes and in its wake there is—far from relief—a crushing emptiness, a void like the silent, blackness of space.

Because no—no, this isn’t a clone. No, she does remember Rey, she does remember, she—

She stops breathing and just stares at her sister. _They just left you. They just left you. _

_And I lied and told myself it was a clone they left behind. Not my sister. Why would they leave my sister? Why would they?_

She’s about to undo the binds at Rey’s wrists when Rey spits out, clearly oblivious to the pain riddling Kira’s soul, “I’d believe you if you weren’t also a creature in a mask, just like _him_.”

She remains still and silent. That had been how she’d avoided dad’s drunken lash-outs after Rey was gone. Small, and quiet, and you’ll draw no notice. She’d become Ben’s shadow at the Praxeum, Kylo’s after he’d destroyed it. Ben had always protected her, had always cared for her, had been the brother she’d gotten when her parents had thrown her sister away. Stay still, and calm, and control your emotions so much that your sister doesn’t know you’ve realized she’s your sister.

“Maybe they were right to leave you behind. I’d rather have him for a brother than you for a sister,” she says and she turns on her heels and flees before she lets her feelings get the better of her, her heart hammering in her throat.


	2. Chapter 2

**Kylo**

“Did you sort it out?”

Kira glares at him. Her mask is off once again and she’s staring out at the sky overhead. Her face, usually so smooth, so unreadable except to those like him who could speak her language fluently, is a mess of confusion—sadness, anger, pain. 

When she turns to look at him, the whites of her eyes are a little pink. “Did you ever think we’d end up on such a frozen waste of a planet?”

_No, because this was Hux’s choice, _he doesn’t say. This is Hux’s project not his. He’d heard enough tales of destroyed Death Stars blowing up as a boy not to think this was hubris. But it was what his master had wanted, and so here he was.

He shrugs. “Quit avoiding.” And her face hardens.

“What do you want, Kylo? Some happy huggy sisterly reunion?”

“Oh, so she’s your sister now? Not a clone?”

He catches the punch she aims at his stomach so easily that he knows she intended that he be able to.

“Nothing hurts like family, right?” she says, looking up at him. There’s an odd look he doesn’t quite know how to parse on her face. It’s unsettling. Strange to feel like suddenly, he doesn’t know her at all.

“Yeah,” he agrees, his breath shaking a little bit. If she were still small, if they were still on Yavin IV, he’d wrap an arm around her shoulder, maybe. Try to comfort her. But Kira is pricklier now than she had been as a girl, and she had been extremely prickly as a girl. She doesn’t want comfort the way she used to, and besides—he’s the master of the Knights of Ren. Comforting isn’t part of that particular job description. And would it even help right now? If suddenly he can’t read her expressions the way he used to? 

He shoves that thought from his mind. If she’s letting her emotions get in the way, he definitely can’t afford to. “We have a job for you.”

“For me?”

Kylo nods. “Something only you can do.”

“Which is?”

“Infiltrate the Resistance.” He watches her compute his words.

“You think they’re going to send someone to rescue her?”

“I can’t fathom they wouldn’t,” Kylo says. “I can’t imagine that—” he takes a deep breath, “that General Organa would let some poor waste of a girl remain in the clutches of the evil Kylo Ren.”

“No, I don’t imagine so,” Kira says quietly. Now she’s watching him closely. He soldiers on. If he doesn’t get to comfort her, he doesn’t give her anything that would let her comfort him. That he might even want comfort is a sign of his own weakness. “So I’m supposed to…How’s that even going to work? I barely know her.”

“And lucky for you, they barely know her,” Kylo says. “FN-2187 deserted only four days ago.” 

“FN-2187?” Kira asks. He had told her that the traitor had been with her sister when he’d first landed on Starkiller, but clearly Kira had not been in a state to register that.

“He was in Phasma’s regiment,” Kylo replies and there it is. She’d observed several of the training modules he’d been in. He was being fast-tracked. His capacities were off the charts.

“He deserted?” Kira asks. 

“Yes.”

“Pity,” she shrugs. He’d be taken care of, though. All deserters were, in the end. The Supreme Leader was wise to suffer no insubordination, and if anyone thought that _Organa_ would be any different if there were traitors to her side, they didn’t know how bloodthirsty Skywalkers could be.

“Yes,” Kylo agrees. “I had hoped he was just spooked at his first engagement on Jakku. In any event, he’d have had no opportunity to know her better than, say, her sister.”

“Her sister who hasn’t seen her since she was six,” corrects Kira. “Her sister who hasn’t spent the past thirteen years nonstop in the Jakku sun.” She pulls up her sleeve to reveal her arm, which is several shades lighter than Rey’s. “But yes. I suppose not. And you don’t think that Han Solo would know her better.”

“Not if what I saw in her mind rings true,” Kylo says calmly. “She met him after FN-2187. She thinks he’s a legend, so you’ll need to forget everything you know, and put some stars in your eyes. You think you can manage?” He gives her a long look, as though daring her to try and say something about his father, about his parents. How many times had she come to find him on Yavin IV, brooding because some short holo hadn’t been nearly enough to brush away the feeling that he was, fundamentally, unwanted?

Kira squares her shoulders. “Yes,” she says. “I can.” She looks just about as determined as he’s ever seen her. She seems more like herself in that moment, the calm, detached Kira he’s always known.

**Rey**

Under any other circumstance, Rey would have done her best to get herself out of these cuffs and off this kriffing planet as quickly as possible. 

But she can’t bring herself to move at all. Now that Kylo is no longer there, now that he’s not there to distract her by asking her questions about anything but Kira, her mind is too full of Kira to do anything at all. It’s like her body has gone so numb that all she can feel is the throbbing pain in her head and her pulsing, beating heart.

_Kira._

How had she forgotten about Kira?

She stares off into the middle-distance until the door opens for the hundredth time it seems.

The next time the doors open, Rey’s cuffs snap open. She almost slides off the rack because she’s so surprised. Kylo Ren is standing before her, his helmet still in his hands. She doesn’t break eye contact with him as she climbs off the rack, stretching her stiff muscles.

“Am I free to go?” she asks him carefully. “Or am I still your guest? Where’s Kira?” That_ I’d rather have him for a brother than you for a sister, _had stung but somehow, it hadn’t hurt the way she’d thought it would. Maybe because, through the pulsing pain in her head, she remembers her sister screaming and sobbing when she’d realized what was happening to her twin. Rey wants to see her again. Wants to talk to her again. Wants to understand. 

“Still my guest,” Kylo Ren replies smoothly. “Come with me. Supreme Leader Snoke wants to see you.” He doesn’t say a word about Kira. 

Rey narrows her eyes. “Or what?” Rey demands. 

“Or I make you,” he says idly. “But you haven’t much liked that in the past, so I thought I’d offer you the opportunity to make your own decisions.”

“And if I decide to leave?” she demands hotly. 

“I don’t think you’ll get very far,” he says. “You don’t know where you are. Besides, are you really going to try to escape before you’ve spoken to Kira?”

She glares at him. He has her there. She had been so afraid in that forest, so worried for her friends. All of that has faded now, and guilt floods her. She shouldn’t turn her back on them, shouldn’t abandon them. And yet she _won’t_ leave until she’s seen Kira again. Tried to understand more. 

Quietly, she follows him out into the hallway, looking around.

She smirks to herself as they walk.

“What’s so funny?”

“Left, then right, then left?” she asks him and he stops short, surprised.

“Yes.”

“You all stole your plans from the Imperial Star Destroyers.”

“They were well crafted,” Kylo Ren acquiesces. His lip curls into an almost approving smile and Rey wishes she didn’t notice how red his lips are once again. He’s a _monster_, not a man with a nice smile.

“And I know them like the back of my hand,” she tells him. She takes another step and rounds the corner. _Which will mean it’ll be easier to get out of here once I give you the slip. _She’s always been good at giving people the slip. Especially since somehow, they always tended to underestimate her.

It does not take him long to catch up with her. He’s tall, his legs are long, and it’s not like Rey had broken into a sprint. “And how do you know where we’re going?”

“Because I imagine that if you’re taking me to your boss, you don’t want to carry me. You’ll look so much—” she stops. Darn it. She should have made him drag her.

“Trust me,” Kylo says, “Snoke won’t care if I drag you kicking and screaming or if you come quietly. Your behavior is no reflection on my capacity to get done what needs to be done.”

“And what needs to be—” A shiver goes up her spine and she tries to control her fear, to draw it back out of her face. 

“We need that map,” Kylo says quietly. “You’ve seen it.”

“When are you going to get out of my head?” Rey whispers at him. Whisper’s the best she can do—she’s not going to cry. It hurts, and it will hurt again. And Kira wanted him more for a brother than her for a sister.

“This will be the last time.” It sounds like he’s trying to comfort her. _Probably because I remind him of Kira. _And the bitterness burns brighter—that Kira had someone, anyone to care for her. She thinks of Finn, who’d wanted to leave, and Han, who’d offered her a job she’d refused. That’s the most she’d ever had, _ever_. And she might never see them again. She might hate Kylo Ren, might be angry and confused about Kira, but at least her sister had someone.

“You promise?” she asks him. She isn’t going to look a gift opportunity in the mouth. It’s a resource and she’ll use it, even if it reminds her of how alone she’s been, how she was the one they—

“I won’t make you a promise I can’t keep,” he says. “But I hope it will be. Does that help?” Were it not for Kira, she’d be confused at the concern in his eyes. But she isn’t. She knows he sees her sister in her face.

Rey swallows, hardens her heart, and marches ahead without responding. If she believed it, she’d think it helped, but she doesn’t let herself believe it. She’d learned never to trust on Jakku. Now’s not a time to change that. Even if Kira trusts him. Even if she called him brother.

_Should you even trust her?_

She doesn’t have time to reflect on that. 

Kylo leads her into a lift and they stand there in silence as it rises and rises and rises. She doesn’t look at him. She can’t look at him. 

She hears him shift, though, and out of the corner of her eye, she sees him settling his helmet back in place. _A creature in a mask. _

Snoke’s creature, muzzled and on a leash. 

It’ll be easier that way. She won’t have to see his concern for her sister, his wide soft lips. She can see the monster from the woods again.

Then the doors open and Rey follows him out, down a long pathway in a deep dark room. His huge hand settles on the small of her back, startling her for a moment before guiding her as she goes. By the time they have reached the heart of the room, she’s oddly glad of his touch.

This is not like the belly of any Star Destroyer, is not like the darkness she’s known on Jakku. She can practically taste it, can feel it buzzing in her lips, in her teeth and she does not like it. It’s like the room is trying to swallow her.

_Does Kira feel at home in the darkness?_

She shivers.

“Are you cold, child?”

The man’s voice is silky smooth.

“No,” Rey lies, putting as much ferocity into her voice as she can—more ferocity than she feels.

He chuckles. “Such fire. You cannot lie to me.”

The holo crackles to life and it’s huge. The humanoid sits on a throne wherever he is, and the depiction of him stretches from floor to ceiling. Rey balls her hands into fists.

“She’s powerful, yes. You were right,” Snoke says. “I can sense her, even from here.”

“An asset,” Kylo says. “If she will agree to be trained.”

“I should hope you’d know by now that agreement has nothing to do with it,” Snoke says. “But first—”

And he stretches his holographic hand out towards Rey.

It’s a horrible feeling—different even from what she’d felt when Kylo had done it. It’s like his fingers are digging through the folds of her brain, and she loses all control of herself. She falls to the ground, choking out sobs as every nerve ending in her body lights itself with resistance to the intrusion. Her eyes are hot and drying by the second, he throat feels like it’s crackling and melting, her lungs are laboring but it is as though the air around her won’t absorb into them.

“Do not fight it, it will make it worse for you if you do,” Snoke says somewhere above her, sounding both lazy and amused. “Aha.”

And it stops. Rey’s shaking and gasping and numb. Her ears are ringing for noises she didn’t hear, her skin is sweating from a heat she hasn’t felt since she left Jakku. And above her, words.

“You feel compassion for her?” Snoke jeers and it takes her a moment to realize he’s addressing Kylo, not herself. “Perhaps if you had pushed yourself far enough, you wouldn’t have had to rely on me to get the information that eluded you. You are weak. You think you are fit to train her?”

“Who would be more fit than I?” she hears Kylo ask. 

“How can you train someone in the Dark Side of the Force if you will not truly let go of the Light? Skywalker had already done too much of your training,” Snoke tells him. 

“And I have rejected Skywalker and his teachings,” Kylo bites out angrily. “You know that.”

“And yet you feel compassion for the girl. Perhaps it is not Skywalker I must consider. You have too much of your father’s heart.”

“I have no father,” Kylo protests through gritted teeth. As Rey’s heart calms, she looks up at him. He looks like a furious child in the face of Snoke’s words.

“I should not have had to accommodate your weakness,” Snoke tells him

“I will not disappoint you,” Kylo says. “I will train her and she will be as powerful of any of my knights. You’ll see.”

Silence rings in her ears and slowly she pulls herself up to a sitting position. _I can do this, _she thinks to her hands and knees. She can get back up on her feet. This isn’t worse than when Teedo’s goons had her four to one and she’d had bruises on her stomach for days. 

She stands.

Snoke laughs.

“Look at her. I think you will have a hard time training her, Kylo Ren. She is as stubborn as her sister.”

Rey glares at him.

“And Kira joined my side willingly,” Kylo replies benignly. “She barely needed convincing to abandon the light. Do you doubt her?”

“I doubt her less than I doubt you, son of Solo,” Snoke says and Kylo stiffens. “Why else would I have sent her to kill Leia Organa?” Rey swallows her own saliva, as Snoke continues loudly, “You see? There it is. You betray your own weak heart. I see it in your soul. You show your own weakness.”

“An impulse, nothing more,” Kylo replies fiercely. Then let me prove myself. Let me go instead of—”

“No. That is her mission, and she is far better equipped for it than you.” She watches as his hands ball into fists at his side, watches as he stares up at the Holo like a whipped cur. “You will find Skywalker and do what you failed to do all those years ago. That is how you will prove to me that you truly are Vader’s heir, that together, you and I will see Vader and Palpatine reborn and the seeds of the Empire will bloom into a bright new future.”

“I won’t fail you,” Kylo Ren replies quietly, and a shiver crosses Rey’s mind.

**Kira**

“Ren.” Kira turns. Armitage Hux is standing behind her, his long dark coat perfectly tailored, his expression pinched and distasteful.

“General,” she replies. 

“Are you going dressed like that?” He gives her a once over, his eyes resting on her hips for a little too long for her to feel wholly at ease.

“No,” she replies. “After their audience, I’m taking her clothes.”

“Good,” Hux replies. “The Rebels have landed and will be looking for her. Make sure you find them, and make it look—”

“I know how to do my job, Hux,” she says. “A kriffing sight better than you.”

“I should hope. There’s one final request from the Supreme Leader.”

“Oh?” She keeps her voice calm. Orders from Snoke don’t usually come through Hux, so either Hux is lying to her right now, or it’s something that neither wants Kylo to know.

“Yes,” Hux replies. “Your orders are to kill Leia Organa.”

That would explain it.

She opens her thermos and takes a long sip of water, thinking quickly. _Why don’t they want Kylo to know? Do they doubt him?_

Something sits uneasily about that. That they would think he wouldn’t want his mother dead, despite all she’d put him through. That they would think him weak, fallible. 

_Is he?_

“All right,” she replies. “Is that all?”

“Congratulations on your long overdue reunion with your sister.”

“Get out.”

He does. 

So they want Leia Organa dead.

She shouldn’t be surprised.

In fact, she’s not. Oddly, the only thing she’s feeling is a nervousness that doesn’t match the situation at all. 

_Will she remember me?_

Kira had only met Leia Organa once: when she’d been about eight, and the Senator had come to visit her brother and son on Yavin IV. She’d put her hand on Kira’s head and smiled at her, and told her she’d make a strong Jedi, and Kira had believed it, had been _proud_ that Ben’s mother would see that potential in her. 

But surely Leia wouldn’t be expecting to see her son’s little friend in a sandrat from Jakku. For all she knows, she won’t remember Kira. Ben had been convinced that she’d barely remembered or cared about him at all, by the end—especially when she hadn’t even _told_ him that Vader was his grandfather, leaving him to find out through the HoloNet like everyone else.

Kira looks at herself in the mirror. She’s paler than Rey, and less waif-like. Her sister had starved on Jakku while she’d had enough to eat these past few years. Hopefully the difference wouldn’t be noticeable. Hopefully she’d still fit into her clothes. 

She takes a deep breath, doing her best to clear her mind.

_But Rey!_

_Sit down and shut up!_

_Mama! What about Rey!_

She will not cry. She has not cried since they left her behind.

She makes her way back to the interrogation room. It’s empty. She leans against the wall and reaches out. Kylo is on his way back. He has Rey in tow.

_I’ll need her clothes, _she tells him silently.

_Snoke just ripped it out of her head. Be gentle, if you’re capable of that, _he replies tersely.

_Kriff off._

When Rey comes back into the room, it’s by herself.

Her face is tearstained and there’s a sickly pallor to her. She looks like she might faint.

“I need your clothes,” Kira says gruffly.

Rey looks at her with dazed eyes. 

“So you’re just going to kill her?” she asks.

“What’s it to you. Do you even know her?”

“No but—” the words hang, unsaid, in the air. 

“Listen,” Kira says and she walks towards Rey. To her credit, her sister doesn’t shrink back. “And listen close. The galaxy isn’t a good place. I’d think you’d know that by now, given what happened when we were young, but you always were softer than me, so maybe you think there’s some light left out there. I don’t. I do what I need to do to survive. If Leia Organa finds me, I’m dead, you got that. So it’s her or me. Now give me your clothes.”

“Will you come back?” Rey asks.

Kira’s mouth goes dry. _Come back! _she hears her sister wailing in the distance. _Mama—please—we have to go back!_

“If I don’t end up dead,” she replies. 

“And then we’ll leave this place?” Rey asks her.

_We_.

_I’m part of a we already, though_. She thinks of Kylo, of the other knights. She can’t just turn her back on them.

_Be gentle, if you’re capable of that._

“Yes,” Kira says. _Little liar. _“We’ll leave this place.” Rey seems to sag with relief. 

Her sister is indeed thinner than she is. Kira can see her bones through her skin as she strips out of her dirty clothes and hands them to her. There are scars on her stomach and arms, and Kira sees her sister’s eyes tracing the ones on her body, too, as she undresses and hands Rey her clothes. “It’ll be easier for you if they think you’re me,” she says. “Besides, it’s better if no one knows I’m gone. That’ll mean you have to stick close to him. He’ll keep you safe in this place.” 

Rey’s face twists in distaste as she puts on Kira’s blacks, which hang loosely off her quite as much as Rey’s wrappings cling tightly to her. And when she looks at her sister—

They have the same face, the same bone structure, the same eyes. But that’s not her mirror image staring back at her. But then again, maybe that’s just because Kira’s always known what’s not her about Rey. She could always tell them apart, after all. She’s always wondered if her parents meant to leave her behind instead. She was more the troublemaker, after all. 

“I’ll come back for you, sweetheart,” she says quietly. “I promise.” And this one she means. She doesn’t know what will come after that, but she does know that much. 

And though she turns to leave the room, she still hears Rey sliding down to the floor and burst into tears.

Kylo is waiting outside, still masked.

“Well?” he asks her.

“Got to go,” she says. “Need to get rescued.”

“I’m leaving as well,” he says. “Snoke has a mission for me.”

“What about—”

“I’m bringing her with me, don’t worry.”

Something in the way he says it—even through the distortion of his mask—makes her glare. “Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“Treat me like I’m going soft.”

“You’re the one who was losing all semblance of control earlier today, not me. And you were about to ask what was happening to her if I was gone? I know you, little liar. Don’t pretend I don’t.”

Rather than respond to it—because he’s right, why is he always kriffing right?—she turns on her heels and marches past him. “I’ll keep her safe,” he calls after her and she pauses.

“Thanks,” she says.

“Keep yourself safe too, ok?”

“You know me, boss,” she replies. “I always make it out alive.”

And she goes. 

She closes off the part of her mind that is still in that interrogation room with Rey. She can’t think about her right now, at least, not like that. 

She is Rey now. Where would Rey go, if she escaped torture and imprisonment? And how to intersect with the Rebels? Where are they going to be looking for her? 

It’s easier than it has any right to be—not that she’d expected it to be hard. She spies them two floors up by a window, trying to work out where to go—an old man, a younger one, and a Wookiee. _Han Solo and Chewbacca_. She’d seen them once or twice from afar, when they’d come to visit Kylo. Kylo had always brooded about it for a good month afterwards and had refused to talk about why. 

She pulls herself out into the hangar and begins to climb. Easy does it. Just so they’ll see her, so she can draw them away from Kylo and Rey.

And sure enough, ten minutes later, they come bursting into view. “Rey!” shouts the younger man and a moment later his arms are around her, holding her close and this—she hadn’t expected this.

“Did they hurt you?” he asks, his arms still tight around her, his heart hammering so strongly she can feel it through his chest. He’s strong—well muscled, and he smells sort of nice, and when he pulls away she feels oddly cold. “We came as fast as we could.”

His eyes are a deep brown, only a slight shade darker than his skin, and his face is more handsome than she’d expected. She didn’t know what she’d expected, given she’d only ever seen him in his helmet before. For all she had known then, he hadn’t had a face at all. But clearly he does, and his gaze intent and his expression is so damn _relieved _to have found her. Kira’s throat closes. Someone cared about Rey. It shouldn’t make her heart twist like that. She needs to get a grip, control her feelings like she’d always managed to do.

“I’m fine,” Kira says a little breathlessly. “I’m fine. Let’s just—let’s just get out of here.”

“Don’t need to tell me twice,” the old man says gruffly. “Good to see you, kid.”

“Thanks for—” Kira says and suddenly her throat closes up once again. Had anyone ever come to get Rey before? Their parents certainly hadn’t.

But Han Solo had come back for Rey. Her heart twists. Kylo’s father hadn’t even come for him. 

“Thanks for coming to get me.”

The younger man takes her hand and she doesn’t protest. He’s very familiar with Rey, and Kira begins to connect dots.

Rey hadn’t mentioned a boyfriend.

If Kylo was to be believed, she’d only known the traitor a few days. But she was always emotional, and she’d been so eager for connection with Kira. Maybe she had been with him too. He keeps casting glances at her out of the corner of his eye, as though checking to make sure that she’s really there, and he hasn’t let go of her hand. That’s a deep attachment, right there. Very deep. She can’t _imagine_ holding Kylo’s hand for this long, wouldn’t want to. But FN-2187 is holding Rey’s hand like he can’t bring himself to let it go, let her go.

“I’m really here,” she says to him quietly after the third or fourth time she catches him checking her. “I’m not going away.”

“Yeah,” he says.

“Finn, Rey.” They both turn. They hadn’t noticed that Han Solo and Chewbacca had turned a corner. “This way.” So he goes by Finn now. Good to know. She supposes she shouldn’t be surprised. If he’s defected, he’d need _something_ to call himself.

“Right,” Finn says. 

The cold hits her hard as they make their way planetside. “Here,” Finn shrugs off his jacket and gives it to her.

“I’m fine,” she says.

“Your lips are already turning blue, Jakku,” he says.

“Won’t you get cold?”

He plucks at the black shirt he’s wearing. “First Order standard. Good in extreme weather.”

Kira nods. She misses that First Order standard. As she shrugs into the brown leather jacket he’d given her, she feels trace amounts of warmth from his skin. It’ll have to do. Somewhere, preparing to leave the planet, Rey will be warm in her blacks.

**Kylo**

“Sir.”

“Ren,” Kylo says without turning around. He is throwing an extra set of his robes into a bag, and trying to figure out what else he could possibly bring with him. Years of an ascetic Jedi lifestyle had trained him young that he didn’t need to travel with more than the skin on his back, so that he was already bringing extra clothes felt luxurious. _I should bring some for Rey too._

“General Hux said you would be leaving again,” Veesh Ren says, his helmet in place. 

“Yes,” Kylo says. “They’re preparing my ship now.”

“Where are you going?” Veesh asks.

Of all his knights, Veesh is the least readable. Kylo tries to tell himself that it’s because the clone’s Force signature isn’t distorted and muffled, but it’s the truth. It feels unnatural to sense him, like the balance of life and death that powers the Force is a little bit off with him because of the nature of his creation. It’s something that Veesh uses to his advantage whenever he can. He is a decent fighter, true, but more importantly: he’s clever. He’s quick to bring his opponents down, usually and unexpectedly by their own hand, somehow.

“A mission from Snoke. We have the map.” He doesn’t need to say more.

“Very good, sir,” Veesh says. “We’ll hold down the fort.”

“I want you to report directly to Snoke while I’m gone,” he tells the knight.

“Oh? I would think Kira—”

“Kira’s off-planet and will be for a while. She has her own orders.” Unbidden, and certainly unwanted, the memory of his mother brushing his hair fills him. 

He does his best to crush it. Leia Organa had never cared about Ben Solo. Her lies had made that clear to him, and he was weak to ever think anything otherwise.

“Ah.” Veesh pauses.

“You’re hovering, Ren,” Kylo observes pointedly.

“Merely—I am surprised. I never thought I’d report directly to the Supreme Leader.”

“Are you frightened?” Kylo asks, almost amused. Veesh is very like Kira. He doesn’t show fear. He’s better than his other knights in that regard. Snoke had found Veesh himself, had presented him to Kylo along with the rest of his knights when he’d left the Praxeum. Surely Veesh isn’t frightened, but it amuses him to prod all the same.

“No sir,” Veesh says at once. “Excited. Proud. I won’t let you down.”

“I’ll also want you to com me once a day, such as you can while I’m hopping in and out of hyperspace,” Kylo continues. He doesn’t trust Hux as far as he can spit and this will be the farthest away from Snoke and the First Order he’ll have gone since he first fled Luke. The irony isn’t lost upon him. “You’re my eyes and ears on the ground while I’m gone.”

“Yes, sir,” Veesh says. “And the prisoner?”

“She’s coming with me,” Kylo says.

“Is that wise?”

Finally, he turns to face Veesh. The other man is shorter than him—though almost everyone is shorter than him—and his mask is more ovular. He crosses his arms over his chest as he looks down at his knight. “She’s untrained and likely as powerful as her sister. Do you really want to be the one tasked with watching her as she starts to explore her powers?”

“I wouldn’t be caught off guard—I know Kira,” says Veesh. 

“I do too,” Kylo says. “And she still managed to catch me off guard. She’s likely already working on exploring her powers right now.” He reaches out to the interrogation room, realizing he’d made a grave error in assuming that she wouldn’t be testing her powers the way that Kira would if she were left alone for more than five minutes. What a good start to all this, to find that she’d already given him the slip the moment that he’d turned his back.

But she hasn’t given him the slip at all. She’s not even testing her powers. She’s still crouched on the ground, crying. Mourning, her emotions rioting in her heart so intensely that they’re permeating her Force signature. No need to dig into her mind this time, it’s all on her sleeve. Everything hurts, her sister is gone _again_ she’s being left behind _again_ it’s like she’s a little girl again, weak and worthless and everything she fought so hard to become got lost out among the stars. It pangs at his heart for a moment. He’s all too familiar with that feeling of worthlessness.

“Will you be telling the others where you’re going?” Veesh asks him after he’s been quiet for a little while. 

“You can do it,” he shrugs. “You’re in command while I’m gone.”

He’s not used to leaving Veesh in charge. Kira, though a good ten years younger than Veesh, has always been his most trusted knight. She’d chosen him, after all. She hadn’t been presented to him by Snoke the way that Veesh had been. But this would be fine—he knows that. Veesh is meticulous and prepared. So are the rest. 

“Yes, sir,” Veesh agrees, and opens his mouth to say more but is interrupted by the blaring of the emergency alarms, crescendoing and then going silent, crescendoing and then going silent. 

“What’s going on?” Kylo asks.

“You don’t suppose the Rebels…” Veesh begins and Kylo rounds on him. 

“Find out. You’re in charge. I have a mission.”

“Yes sir,” Veesh says at once.

Kylo shoulders his bag and descends four levels to the interrogation room and unlocks the door.

Rey is crouched in a corner, dressed in blacks that cover every inch of her skin. 

He closes the door behind her and stands over her. Kira’s helmet is sitting on the counter, and he hands it to her.

“You’ll need to wear this until we’re on the ship. That way no one will question that you’re leaving with me.”

She looks up. Her eyes are red and puffy, her face is tear-streaked.

“What’s happening?” she asks.

“If I had to make an educated guess,” he says, “your friends have managed to infiltrate our defenses and are blowing the planet up. Which means no matter what, you’d have to come with me.” The helmet is still in his hands, and she stares at it for a long time, but doesn’t move. The alarms keep blaring and Kylo grows impatient.

“Got a better option of where to go?” he quips at her.

“Back to Finn,” she snaps, her eyes flashing up to meet his. “Or—“

“Kira’s offworld by now. You know that. You want to see her again, come with me now and put this thing on.”

Her eyes flick over him, his mask, his shoulders, his hands. He knows that she is just taking stock of the enemy but his mouth goes dry all the same.

“Unkar Plutt used to send goons out to the sands when you crossed him,” she says. “Out in the sands, no one could hear you scream.”

“I don’t plan to make you scream,” he says. 

“Pity—you already did,” she retorts. It’s not even a fraction of the flare that she’d shown before Snoke had ripped through her head. He knows that feeling too well.

“And I said that would be the last of it,” he replies. “I meant it. Rey,” he holds out a hand to pull her to her feet. She stares at it for a long while. 

“Unkar Plutt also used to send out two people—one to make the sweet offer and one to give the beating,” she says, her eyes on his hand. “Never send one person to do both.” And her gaze leaves his hand and she looks at him, defiant. “You can be all sweet words now, but I remember what you are.” She stands on her own, and grabs Kira’s helmet, putting it on her head. “And I want _none_ of your help.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Finn**

Finn knows that she’s lying.

They definitely tortured her. It’s what they do. She’s pale, and her gaze is distant and she keeps reaching for his hand for comfort. He lets her do it. Given how viciously she’d snarled when he’d tried to take her hand on Jakku, this is progress. This is a sign that she has forgiven him for wanting to flee on Takodana, that he matters to her as much as she matters to him. He’ll take it.

She’s still wearing his—Poe’s—jacket, and once they’re safely in hyperspace, she keeps tucking it tighter around herself. She’s distant, and hurting, and hadn’t even reacted when Starkiller Base had blown up behind them. Her face had been completely blank.

“There are blankets in those drawers—or should be, unless Ducain got rid of ‘em,” Han says when he comes out of the cockpit. Finn opens the drawer and finds some heavy blankets, which he hands to Rey. 

She gives him a tight smile. “Thanks.” Then she shrugs out of his jacket and hands it back to him, goosebumps erupting across her skin before she wraps herself in the blanket. 

“You ok, kid?” Han asks her.

She nods. “I’m just glad not to be there anymore.”

“What happened?” Han asks.

“They—he—” She takes a deep shuddering breath, biting her lower lip between her teeth. “They interrogated me. They were looking for the map to Luke Skywalker. They…” her voice trails away, her eyes start to water. “I don’t know what it was. That monster—Kylo Ren—he—he—”

Finn’s hand tightens into a fist. 

Kylo Ren had spared his life at Taunul, and Finn had almost thought to be grateful to him. But between first Poe and now Rey, all he can think is that the man is _nothing_ but evil. He’d spared Finn’s life while putting an entire town to death. _Why_ had Finn thought he would be anything but evil? 

He shares a glance with Han. “It’s ok, kid,” Han says gruffly. “It’s over now. You’re safe.”

“Did they get it out of you? The map?”

Rey rubs her eyes, blinks back tears. “Yeah,” she says. “Yeah, they did.”

Finn’s skin goes cold. “Did they learn where the base was? Did they also get that—”

Rey nods, and a single tear drops down her cheek. “I’m sorry,” she moans. “I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Han says. “Better for us to know so we can get the word to Leia that they’ll have to move camp again. She’s used to that. Probably was planning on moving it anyway.”

Rey nods. 

“Try and get some rest,” Finn urges her. “We’ve still got a few hours before we get there. Kylo Ren can’t touch you here.”

Rey nods and curls up into a ball and closes her eyes.

“Hey, Big Deal,” Han says and he jerks his head towards one of the hallways. Finn follows him. “Try not to treat her like a broken bird. She’ll bounce back.”

“She was tortured,” Finn hisses at him. “She needs to be taken care of.”

“Yeah, and she probably just wants to feel normal again.”

“Oh yeah? What would you know about it?”

“I’ve been tortured once or twice,” Han says. “But more importantly, I met my wife right after she’d been tortured and I’m fairly certain that part of why she stayed sane was being able to boss me and Luke around for a little bit afterwards. Follow her lead, but don’t drag it out longer than she wants the comfort, ok?”

Finn looks up at him, then sags. “Yeah, ok,” he says. “Poe was sort of like that right after he was tortured too. A little manic with needing to feel normal again.” He’ll never forget the look on Poe’s face, the light in his eyes. Rey’s numb, but Poe had been on fire. 

“Not sure who Poe is, but yeah. Follow her lead. I’m sure she’ll be spitting fire again soon. Like you said, we won’t let him near her again.”

And a thought unfurls in Finn’s mind, one he hadn’t wanted to let himself entertain before now. “What if they come after her?” he says. “What if _he_ comes after her?”

“If the First Order is anything like the Empire, my guess is they’ll be focusing on what they got, rather than a scavenger from Jakku,” Han says. “They’ll think it’s fine that she slipped out from under them, have faith that she didn’t learn anything that they’d deem dangerous, and leave it at that. Especially if they have Luke’s location now.”

“We have to warn him,” Finn says at once. “We have to race them to him—find and—”

“Relax, kid,” Han says. “For one thing, I know Luke can handle himself. For another, there’s no way we’ll be able to catch up. They’ll likely have sent people after him already. By the time we’re able to trail them, they’ll be too far ahead of us for it to make a difference.”

“But—“

“Focus on what we’ve got. We have her back, safe. We know we’ll be able to help the Resistance live to fight another day. And we have whatever’s in your head for bringing them down. It’ll be ok.” 

Except it won’t be ok.

Han Solo—he keeps bringing up the Empire. Finn knows nothing about the Empire but he does know something about the First Order, and once again, all he wants to do is run. He has Rey now. He can try to convince her to come with him, now that the Resistance has what they want, now that they’ve returned BB-8 to Poe. They can flee across the stars, keep one another safe, not look back.

She had held his hand. She wants him there. He matters to her too. 

Finn nods slowly. “Yeah,” he says distantly, his mind full of running. “It’ll be—”

“You ok, kid?” Han asks, his gaze resting over Finn’s shoulder.

Rey’s hovering there, wrapped in a blanket. “Oh—sorry—I just—I wanted to hear what you were planning.”

“Yeah,” Finn says at once. “Nothing to hide. No need to treat her like a broken bird, just because she was tortured.”

Han gives him a glare and looks like he’s about to say something but Finn’s already walking back towards Rey. She reaches for his hand again and he takes it. He likes the way it feels in his.

**Rey**

The moment the gangplank closes behind them, Rey takes off Kira’s mask. She sheds some of the outer layers of her uniform as well. She’s too warm in all those layers. Kylo is in the cockpit, lifting the ship into the air and flying out over the planet. Rey stares out of the viewports and watches as the snowy landscape gets smaller and smaller. The surface is crackling, splitting open, bright red flames from the center of the planet melting the rock above it, contrasting sharply with the deep blue of the nighttime snow.

“How do you know I’m not going to break your ship?” she calls to him. 

“There aren’t bonds that can hold you that won’t also hold me,” he replies. “So I’m trusting in the fact that anything you do to harm the ship will also harm you—and that you want to get back to your sister.”

“I don’t,” Rey lies. She knows that Kira had said that he’d protect her, look after her, but the longer she’s in his presence, the more she thinks about what it had felt like to have him rooting around in her brain and she hates it. Him and Snoke—no matter what Kira says, they’re both monsters. _Does that make Kira a monster too?_

She misses Finn. Finn was her _friend_. She’d never had a friend before, but she’d found Finn. That was the only explanation for why it had hurt so much when he’d said he was going to the Outer Rim. He’d been willing to leave her behind and only the people she cares about leave her behind. She wishes she were back with him instead of with Kylo Ren. She hopes he’s safe. Hopes that he hadn’t been hurt when Maz’s little castle had been destroyed. Another thing she can lay at Kylo Ren’s feet.

“Kira’s a better liar than you,” he replies evenly. “But I don’t think even she could pull that one off. Besides. You’ve already told me you want to get back to her, so whatever defiance you want to show, this is not the way to do it.”

“I could try and slit your throat,” Rey says. “And fly this ship wherever I want.”

“I encourage you to try. We’ve got quite the trip ahead of us and I could do with some entertainment. You’ll want to sit down,” he adds.

“Will I?”

“Up to you if you want to fall on your ass while I make the jump.”

Rey sits down, and a moment later her stomach does the same lurch it did when Han Solo had put them into hyperspace.

It feels like a million years ago.

Suddenly, she feels so very tired. She tucks her knees up against her chest, leans against the wall, and closes her eyes. 

She’d told Finn she wanted to get back to Jakku. Maz had told her that they were never coming back for her, but there was one who still could. 

_Kira_.

Sometimes, when she’d been alone on Jakku, she’d dreamed of herself off on distant planets, strong and stoic and clever and sad. She’d been alone too, in those dreams. And then she’d started wearing black.

She is only vaguely aware that she’s falling asleep when Kylo tucks a blanket around her.

**Kira**

Kira tries to sleep for as much of the trip as she can. She’ll need all her wits about her when she reaches the main base. Sleeping also means she has to interact less with Finn and Han Solo and she’ll be less likely to give herself away. Not that she thinks she would. But she’s on edge in a way she isn’t usually.

The Resistance had destroyed Starkiller Base. They had done that. How many people had they killed? Had Kylo gotten off planet all right? Would this mean her orders would change? Or would it just put pressure on her to complete them faster?

She can imagine it now—the Supreme Leader telling her to do it and have done with it, and not worry about an escape plan. Somehow, she doesn’t think Snoke cares if she lives or dies, and once, she might not have either. She’s a weapon, after all. A significantly more replaceable weapon than Starkiller Base for that matter. But she had promised Rey that she’d come back for her and she has every intention of keeping that promise. 

She can’t forget it, especially not when they keep calling her Rey.

Every time, it’s like this shiver crosses her skin, something she shouldn’t feel, something she shouldn’t _be_. 

She remembers her own face staring back at her, confused, hurt, angry—emotions Kira learned a long time ago not to show. How openly her sister had shown them all.

Would Finn expect her to show her emotions as readily as Rey? Or will she be able to just pretend that the First Order had tortured her and now she’s guarded? Especially since she’ll be at a Resistance Base, and won’t have been there before.

Her mind spins too much for her to sleep, and she ends up tossing and turning on the uncomfortable bunk, pressing her feet against the wall in an effort to ground herself. 

_Did Kylo sleep on this bunk when he was a kid? _

It is possibly the least helpful thought she’s ever had, thinking about him small and brooding and staring at the ceiling as sleep evades him too. 

_I’ll kill her, then we’ll find Luke, _she promises the child who’d felt so rejected by his family, that blistering sadness that they’d silently recognized in one another when her parents had abandoned her on Yavin IV.

At least she hadn’t screamed after them to come back for her.

She hadn’t wanted them to, after what they’d done to Rey.

She’d forgotten why. 

She kicks the wall.

_Such a good liar that I lie to myself. _She’ll never be able to live it down. Not ever. Kylo staring at her in disbelief as she’d refused to accept that Rey was anything more than a clone. Her sister, her sobbing sister, the one who’d always been more of a baby than her, who had cried over everything which had only made dad yell at her more. 

Kylo will keep her safe. She doesn’t doubt that. He’ll try to train her, too. By the time that Kira sees her again, things will be more stable. The Resistance will be ground to a halt and scrambling to replace Organa, Kylo will be free of the ghosts of his family, and she and her sister will be able to…

What? Have a family?

It sounds stupid and sentimental, even to her own ears. She’s not naïve enough to think that family is possible in a world like theirs. She’d decided long ago that the family you were born with was far inferior to the family you chose. Blood only ever hurt you in the end. She’ll take being Kylo’s lieutenant in the Knights of Ren and the distantly companionable competence of the other knights that Snoke had given to him when they’d arrived together after the destruction of Luke’s Praxeum. Kylo’s the reason she’s here. She followed him to this, and everything else was orders, no different in some ways than what she would have had from Luke. He only pretended he wasn’t training weapons. 

But now, suddenly, there’s Rey and she doesn’t want Rey to hurt her, doesn’t want to hurt Rey, but how can family _not_ hurt? Or is it simply knowing that they will, but they at least won’t be alone again. They can at least…

Hot rage flares in her as she thinks about her parents once again. They’d torn their daughters’ lives apart. They had done this to them. She and Rey—they could have had years. They could be the perfect team. They could rely on one another the way that she and Kylo rely on one another, could move in tandem, perfect and deadly mirrors of one another.

Instead, she’s sitting here, determined to keep herself alive so that she can see her again so that maybe, just maybe—

They’d always held hands as girls. Not the way that Finn keeps grabbing hers. When mom had been drunk and dad had been shouting and they’d been frightened, they’d held one another’s hands. They weren’t alone if they had each other. They didn’t have to be frightened because they were together. 

Her eyes prickle but she doesn’t cry.

She hasn’t cried since they’d left Rey. She’s _not_ going to start crying again now that she’s there again, now that she’s alive.

And now that Snoke is separating them, once again.

Not for long, though. She’ll be back, and Organa will be dead, and they’ll move forward from there.

_He wouldn’t kill her, _a quiet young voice floods her mind, not Kira now, but Kira as she had been when Kylo had been Ben and she’d been a terrible liar. 

_You wouldn’t kill my mother, would you? _

It’s Ben’s voice, not Kira’s, and a lump fills her throat. 

_He’s not that boy anymore, _she berates herself, tossing again. _He wants to be free of them. He does. __Leia Organa is a lying snake. She betrayed him. So what if she’s his mother?_

_Mothers aren’t to be trusted._

**Kylo**

She’s not Kira.

He has to remind himself of that after he tucks her in. Because he keeps checking over his shoulder to make sure she’s all right, that she hasn’t rolled off the bench that she’s resting on or something, as if he were thirteen and back on Yavin IV, taking care of the newest student who is too distraught to take care of herself. Not that Kira remembers it that way, but she’d been so young.

So young, and unable to articulate so much. Vaguely, he remembers an imaginary friend she’d mentioned once or twice before never mentioning her again. Was that Rey? The memory of a twin she’d been torn from who hurt too much to let herself keep remembering? 

He’d always cared about that little kid, still remembers the way stubborn ways she had gone about learning how to use the Force, but his heart aches for her now, as he glances over at Rey. Rey, who seems determined to hate him, her eyes blazing at him darkly every time he catches her watching him.

That doesn’t matter, though. Everyone hates him except for Kira. This is nothing new. And it won’t stop him from keeping her safe. He’d promised Kira he’d keep her safe.

He shakes himself. He shouldn’t brood on this.

He has to focus on the mission at hand.

It’ll be a lot of short hops from here to the planet that Snoke had found in Rey’s head. He’s not so much a fool as to think that he can blast his way straight through the Unknown Regions, even with a scrap of a map. Not even his father would be that crazy.

The trip will likely take two weeks if not more. _At least he’ll have no way of knowing we’re coming._

What does it matter if he didn’t collect the droid?

He has faith in Kira to delay the Resistance in sending ships to look for them. Hopefully it’ll take them a few days to even get back to wherever they’re based—buy him a little more time. Hopefully she’ll start with that and not with the other task she’d been given. 

Except no.

No, he shouldn’t think that. _She_ means nothing to him. She must die. The Resistance destroyed Starkiller Base, Organa thumbing her nose at them. She’d keep doing it as long as she lives. Someone needs to take her out, knock her down. 

Her and Skywalker both.

And he’s shaking a little bit, rage and pain fueling him.

_Yes,_ he can hear his master saying. _Yes. Feed that pain. Feed that anger. It will make you strong._

_You are weak._

_I will make myself worthy of you, grandfather, _he thinks darkly at Snoke’s accusation. He will destroy Skywalker, and his lieutenant will take out Organa and _he_ will be the only thing that remains of Vader’s bloodline. He, alone. He will finish what his grandfather started, bring back the Empire that he had given his life to serving. He will stand at the Supreme Leader’s side as his grandfather had stood at the Emperor’s—a shadow to be feared, a power not to be tested, the true face of the dark side of the Force. 

He sees that flash of green again and his mouth goes dry. _Soon, _he thinks. He should have stayed and made sure that the house had properly crushed his uncle. He’s still not sure why he didn’t. 

_And with him gone, I’ll be safe._

They don’t deserve his protection, his _love_. They had never loved him. They had driven him away. His _uncle_ had driven him away with that bright green noble blade of his.

That is when he gets up out of the pilot’s seat and strolls to the back of the shuttle. Rey is still sleeping.

He watches her sleep, lets his breathing steady and the memory of that lightsaber fade. 

Rey wakes after a time, her eyes peeking open.

She sits up, tugging her knees to her chest. “Were you watching me?” she asks him sharply.

“Needed something to do.”

“Because navigating the ship and keeping us from crashing into a star is too much to ask.”

“We won’t need to leave hyperspace for another…four hours at least. And you can’t stare out the viewport for too long or you’ll go mad.” He shrugs.

“Well—leave me alone,” she says.

“Yeah, I’ll go for a walk. Stretch my legs.”

“By all means.”

He doesn’t move. The ship is too small for that. As he’d gotten older, he’d thought that his dad’s hunk of garbage ship was small, but it’s nothing on these shuttles. Even the ones that are built for deep space travel barely have enough sitting room for their passengers. There are four bunks in this one, and four seats in the cockpit that is connected by a thin passageway towards the back and that’s it. Close quarters doesn’t even begin to describe it.

They sit there in silence for the full four hours. Rey watching him, him watching her. Their knees are inches apart.

He’ll never admit it to her, but it’s a relief when the navicomputer sounds and he resists letting out a sigh. _She’s as stubborn as Kira. _This doesn’t surprise him, given what glimpses of Jakku he’d seen in her memory. That place isn’t for the soft. Her jaw sets in exactly the same way. But she’s not Kira, and lets out little huffs of frustration, her face a constant open book of how she feels about him. Just in case he ever forgets where he stands with her.

_I need to get her to let me teach her._

Does she have to like him first? She seems the type to refuse out of spite. He doubts very much that she’d submit to the sort of trainings that his master had seen fit to put him through. He doesn’t like the idea of her bloodied and bruised. It’s too much like Kira.

_So she’ll have to like me then._

He wonders how it would change her face if she did. Her lips would soften from their grimace, her face would relax, her eyes might even get cheerful and bright. 

He slams that thought as brutally out of his mind as he can. _Weak, _he hears in Snoke’s voice. _You feel compassion for her. You want more from her. You want to see her _smile?

And he stops looking at her out of the corner of his eye. That’s a temptation he can’t manage right now. One moment of weakness and he runs the risk of being exactly what Snoke had accused him of—being too much his father’s son, who’d do anything for the smile of someone he wanted to care about him.

_You want her to care about her because of Kira, _he tells himself. _That’s all. Nothing more._

He eases them out of hyperspace and Rey comes up behind him and settles into one of the seats behind him. “Where are we?” she asks at last.

“Fueling port,” he replies. The charts that Veesh had recovered from the archives of the Empire had been frustratingly incomplete, but this place, at least, had seemed like a solid place to refuel. “Stretch the legs, get something to eat, maybe.” That catches her interest. “Don’t think about running away. I will find and catch you.”

She makes a noise in the back of her throat as though snorting and just because he can he freezes her in her seat. She struggles against the full weight of his Force signature, and she—

Moves her hand.

Just the lightest of twitches, but it’s something.

Kylo smiles. “Good,” he says, releasing her. “You’re learning.”

“I don’t need you,” she snaps at him. 

“You need a teacher,” he replies. “Your sister is as precise as anyone I’ve ever seen with the Force, and strong as a hurricane. You could be too.” Her eyes narrow at the mention of her sister. It confuses him. _She’s_ the one who’s so determined to get back to Kira, after all. 

“I don’t _want_ you to teach me,” she snaps, which he can’t say surprises him. “I’ll teach myself.” And he’s sixteen again, staring at a fuming Kira who is point-blank refusing to let anyone help her, always determined to find the answer herself.

“That’s stupid,” he tells her. “That’s just stupid. You can’t even begin to fathom the power of the Force. Guidance will help you understand.” Ok, so he’s clearly not going with the _get her to like him_ route, but that was always going to be a longshot anyway. She doesn’t have to like him to recognize he’s right.

“I’ve taught myself _plenty_, thank you very much,” she retorts. “Or have you forgotten that I understood your base’s plans without ever having seen them. I can figure the Force out for myself. I don’t need your help and I don’t _want_ it.”

Before he can respond, the ship’s comlink crackles to life. He spends the next five minutes negotiating with the port commandant the price of entry since he doesn’t have a permit—he’s generous, he thinks, considering that he’s not just open-firing on the command station, but this isn’t a ship designed for battle. There are protocols in the First Order manuals that indicate when such a tactic is necessary. You take what you want. You leave nothing behind.

He lands at the edge of the port, and immediately, a set of droids connects the fuel pumps and he gets to his feet, stretching his arms up overhead, his fingers brushing the ceiling of the ship. He leans into the ceiling, cracking his back slightly. “Food?” he grunts at Rey, still not looking at her. He doesn’t want to see her not-smiling.

“Yes,” she says at once, a little too eager for someone who has said she doesn’t want or need his company. _But of course—she’s spent her life starving. _

The little port doesn’t have a lot of life in it, but that doesn’t surprise him. The Unknown Regions aren’t exactly the most populated part of the galaxy. And it shouldn’t surprise him that they’re getting wary looks. He’s a stranger in a place that probably doesn’t get strangers. But there’s more than a little fear in their eyes as they look between him and his ship.

_Good_, he thinks. Snoke had started in the Unknown Regions. They _should_ remember what he’s capable of, who he serves. 

They find a diner near the edge of the port and Kylo finds a fresher and takes the longest piss of his life, keeping his Force signature trained on Rey the whole time. She doesn’t make a run for it. She just sits at the table and when he joins her, she’s staring at the menu.

It’s not the most robust menu in the galaxy, Kylo decides as he looks it over. But there’s protein and—more importantly—caf, and when the waiter stops by to take their order, he orders something simple.

Rey does not ask his permission before ordering half of the fucking menu.

He stares at her as she goes on and on and on.

“You’re not going to be able to eat all of that,” he says. “There’s physically not enough room in a human stomach.”

“Some’s for when we get back on the ship,” she says.

“I’m not going to starve you on there.”

“How would I know? I’m your prisoner, aren’t I? Oh, no, wait. I’m your guest. Forgive me for being rude.” He can’t tell if it’s annoying or intriguing that despite her fixation on her being his prisoner, she continues to have a smart mouth on her. Straight backbone and fearless—the way she’d walked into Snoke’s audience hall on Starkiller. 

“Because, once again, anything that happens to you happens to me out here.”

She changes tacks. “There were cannibal gangs on the other side of the Graveyard of Giants and I stayed alive even when they tried to get me. For all I know, you’re fattening me up to eat me.” She’s so stubborn, and her jaw sets so exactly the same way that Kira’s does that his lips twitch towards a smile. “What?” she snaps.

“You’re like your sister is all,” he replies.

And she looks away from him, her frown deepening. “Yes, I suspect we’re just interchangeable, aren’t we?”

“Not particularly,” Kylo says, not letting himself wonder what it would be like if she smiled at him. He’d never once wondered what it would be like if Kira smiled at him. Kira’s not a smiler, but he suspects that Rey is. “But it’s amusing.”

“Glad I amuse you, at least,” she says darkly. “I’m going to the fresher.”

She’s there for a long while, and when she comes back, her food is waiting for her and her eyes are a little red. She throws herself into eating with gusto, and refuses to look at him until the red in her eyes has faded.

“It upsets you—your sister,” he observes. It’s not exactly the hardest observation in the world, but he’s definitely not going to dance around it. She needs to learn to face her harsh truths. He’d have thought that Jakku would have beaten that into her.

“Oh well spotted,” she huffs at him with her mouth full. His mother would be horrified. _Wait until you’ve finished chewing to speak, Ben. _His jaw tightens. “You’re just like them, aren’t you? Doesn’t matter about me so long as you have Kira. Tell me—would I even be here if it weren’t for her? Would you have killed me or thrown me out like garbage or—”

“I don’t know,” he bites out angrily, “would you have thrown me out of your mind, or broken the paralysis I put on you?”

“I don’t know,” she snaps right back at him.

“Well, if you did, chances are we’d be here,” he fumes. “Because I’m not going to let someone this strong with the Force out of my sight, regardless of who her family is. Family is no indication of who someone’s born to be.”

He is breathing heavily. He’s angrier than he wants to be right now. That little thought of his mother had set him off. _Weak_, he hears in Snoke’s voice again. _Can’t control yourself. Like a rabid dog. She holds power over you as long as she can make you this angry._

And Kira’s going to kill her. He’ll be free then. Free of it all. Then he won’t have to worry about being on the brink of losing control at the thought of the table manners his mother had insisted upon when he’d been a wild little boy who might embarrass her in front of other Senators.

At least he’s not sabering the table in half the way he did when Mitaka told him they hadn’t found the droid.

He grabs some of his own food and shoves it into his mouth. She does the same. They sit there, glaring at one another, stuffing their faces until they’re both full. 

“Right, let’s go,” he says, dropping credits on the table and getting to his feet. Rey gathers up what they didn’t eat and they return to the ship. 

He takes them to the skies, to the stars, Rey sitting in the seat behind him, and it’s when they’re in hyperspace again that she speaks at last.

“Why do you want to kill Luke Skywalker?”

He should say because his master commands it, because Skywalker is an enemy to order and balance while claiming to stand for it, that his uncle isn’t the hero everyone thinks he is.

But he goes hot and cold again, and sees green glowing in the blue of the speeding stars around them, and so the words coming out of his mouth aren’t quite what he planned:

“Because he wanted to murder me first.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Finn**

They land on D’Qar and Rey takes his hand as they descend from the Falcon. Whatever they did to her on Starkiller Base—it’s clearly shaken her.

He doesn’t mind, though. Her hand feels good in his, warm and calloused, with a firm grip. It’s steadying. _We’ll get you safe, _he thinks. _We’ll get out of here, get you safe. I promise. _

“We need to get out of here,” is the first thing out of Finn’s mouth as General Organa approaches them. “Even if we—”

“Even if that thing has been destroyed, they know we’re here,” she agrees. Thank you—for everything.” Then her eyes go to Rey. “You’re Rey?”

Rey takes a slow breath and nods. Finn squeezes her hand in reassurance.

“It’s ok,” he tells her. “This is General Organa,” then he adds, remembering how excited she’d been to realize that Luke Skywalker wasn’t a legend, but a real person, “Luke Skywalker’s sister.”

Rey’s eyes go wide, almost as though she can’t believe it, and General Organa smiles. 

“I’m glad you’re safe, dear,” she says. “We should get her to the medical unit, make sure she’s ok.”

“I’m fine,” Rey says. “They—”

“They tortured you,” Finn says fiercely. “We should at least make sure you’re in basic working order.”

“They tortured you?” the General asks sadly.

“That monster Kylo Ren,” Rey spits angrily and the General takes a slow breath, her eyes going to her husband. Han Solo shakes his head almost imperceptibly and Finn’s surprised to watch the older woman’s eyes go sad. As though she’s been defeated, somehow. She takes Rey’s hand and says. 

“I’m sorry, dear,” she says quietly. “You’re safe now, though. But you should get checked out. If they did anything to—”

“It was all,” Rey gulps and shakes her head from side to side. “They were trying to get a map out of my head. The map to Luke Skywalker. I don’t think there’s anything for me in a medical wing.”

The General looks winded, and even sadder than before. She looks at her husband again. This time, Han Solo speaks. 

“It’ll be ok,” he says.

“Han, I know you love this hunk of junk, but if they have already parsed it before we have, then they’ll have sent men after him already.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Han protests. “Luke’s a big boy who can take care of himself. It’ll still be ok.”

“I know it’s bad whenever you start trying to comfort us all instead of running,” the General says after a moment. 

“Well what do you want me to say? The First Order’s going to crush us and _Kylo Ren_—“ he cuts himself off. Whatever it is he’d been about to say, he doesn’t seem to want to say aloud. 

_He’s right_, Finn thinks, looking around. He’d noticed it the first time they’d been on Jakku, but now it feels almost laughable, that this group of people could stand up to the military might of the First Order. Laughable. Who are they trying to kid?

Finn had seen Kylo Ren freeze Poe’s blast in midair with one hand. One hand, and he’d defied death. What chance did a ragtag volunteer army stand against someone like that? And he was just one of seven. There were six other knights just like him, each of them capable of killing with a look before Finn could even raise his blaster to defend himself.

That was the First Order.

“I’m sorry,” Rey whispers next to him. 

The General looks back to Rey, her expression softening. “Sweetheart, it’s not your fault. Not even a little bit.”

“Kylo Ren—” Rey begins but the General cuts her off.

“Snoke won a victory, but Snoke won’t win this war. We won’t let him. We just need to change tactics. Now, let’s get moving.” She turns and marches back towards the base. Finn glances over at Han.

“Do you really think it’s going to be ok?” he asks.

“With that thing blown up, I think we can do anything,” Han replies but he sounds sad. “But so can they.” And he’s taking off after his wife. 

Next to him, Rey is picking at a piece of dry skin that’s coming loose from her lips. She is watching the retreating backs of the General and her husband. Her face is blank, numb. 

“It’ll be ok,” Finn says quietly to her because what else is he supposed to say? She’d just gotten tortured and is still shaken from it all. Kylo Ren had invaded her mind, taken what he’d wanted from her. “We’ll help, but if we can’t help, we’ll run. Run so far the First Order won’t find us. We’ll find a way to be safe. I promise.”

Rey looks like she doesn’t believe him and it breaks his heart. He hates Kylo Ren more than he ever has in that moment. There doesn’t seem to be any fight left in her right now. No defiance, no begging him to stay, even though he’s promising to stay at her side. No anything. He squeezes her hand again. “It’s not your fault.”

“I know,” she says automatically, mechanically. She blinks in quick succession, as though trying not to cry. “I just wish I could make it right somehow.”

“There’s nothing to make right. You didn’t know, Rey. There’s nothing you could have done.”

She doesn’t reply. She just looks sad.

“Hey,” Finn says and he could _kick_ himself for not having done it sooner. He reaches into the inside pocket of his jacket. He’d wanted to keep it safe. Sure, it had had a belt clip, but just hanging off his hip hadn’t felt particularly safe. “This is yours. Maz said it chose you.”

Rey’s eyes flash with recognition when she sees the lightsaber, then with nervousness. 

“I can’t,” she says. “I’m not a Jedi.”

“I’m not either and I’ve used it,” he says. “It chose you.”

He holds it out to her. Tentatively, she takes it. It fits easily into her hand. 

“That’s the switch to turn it on,” he says, pointing to it and she presses the button.

Clear crystal blue emerges from the saber with a light hum. She jogs it up and down in her hand and the hum gets louder and softer. 

“Thanks,” she says quietly. “For keeping it safe.” She gives him another hesitant smile, her eyes so far away. _If she’d had it, would Kylo Ren have been able to kidnap her? Would all this have happened?_

Finn doesn’t let himself go too far down that road right now.

“Come on,” he says at last. “Let’s get something to eat. See if we can help with the pack up or something.” The base is already bustling. 

“Get ourselves situated,” Rey says. “Learn the lay of the land.”

Relief floods him when she gives him a tentative smile. “Yeah. Come on—let’s meet Poe. He’s BB-8’s owner. He lived, Rey. He survived the crash!”

And he leads her towards the base.

**Rey**

It’s because he says murder and not kill that Rey doesn’t respond immediately.

Murder is different from kill. She learned that on Jakku.

She could understand why Luke Skywalker would want to _kill_ him. He’s dark, and Skywalker is light, the one who destroyed Vader, the one who saved the Rebellion from destruction. But murder isn’t killing. Murder feels more personal. 

“Don’t believe me?” Kylo Ren asks her, leaning back in his seat, a wry smile in his face. “Go on, say it. I can see it in your face.”

“Why would he want to murder you?” she asks. “Did you—did you know him?”

And Kylo laughs, though only for lack of a better word. It doesn’t sound like he finds the question funny at all. “Oh, I knew him,” he says. “I knew my _uncle_ very well.”

“Your—”

“Oh yes, my uncle. My mother, _Leia Organa, _sent me to her brother to train to be a Jedi, and he tried to murder me in my sleep. Unfortunately for him, I woke up and was able to keep myself alive. I woke up because he was in my head. You remember what that feels like, don’t you?”

A shiver goes up Rey’s spine.

“You’re lying,” she says at once. Except she can tell at once that he’s not. _There’s a difference between calling Luke Skywalker a murderer and stealing your toys, Rey. _That’s what Kira had said back on Starkiller Base. 

“No,” he says. “Kira’s always been a better liar than me. But not even Kira could come up with a lie that would eclipse the truth of that one. She saw it was the truth.” Rey’s head is ringing, her heart is aching. This can’t be the truth. This can’t be the truth. Not Luke Skywalker. 

His eyes narrow. “And so do you. Oh,” a small, hard smile, “you do.”

Rey gets up out of the seat at once and he calls after her, “Don’t lie to yourself, Rey. Life is easier to face when you confront it head on from a position of strength, rather than a position of weakness and fear.”

“I’m not afraid,” she shoots back at him.

“Yes you are,” and he stands. It’s frustrating how tall he is. She has to tilt her head up as he approaches her so that her eyes can remain locked on his. “You’re very afraid. Afraid all that waiting was for nothing, afraid that I’m telling the truth and the stories that got you through were nothing more than stories.”

“Get out of my head,” she snaps at him.

“I’m not there,” he replies. 

“Yeah, but you’re reaching for—for things you—”

“It’s on your face, Rey. For someone who lies very well to herself, you aren’t very good at hiding your feelings.”

“Guess I’m not exactly like Kira, then,” she snaps. “And I’ve made it through my life _just fine_ without any of your advice.”

She hurls herself away from him, praying he’ll keep his distance this time as she climbs onto one of the bunks and curls up, facing the wall, desperate once again, always, for sleep.

Her head hurts. Not the way it hurt after Snoke had grabbed at her mind, a different hurt, a tired hurt. Luke Skywalker can’t have done that to him. Luke Skywalker is a hero, a legend, has a heart of the finest light and only has the purest and noblest intentions. He can’t have. Painful, and cold, and invasive, and—and—

His_ uncle._

But even as she lies there, and tries very hard to think of reasons that it might not be the truth, her mind keeps taking her back to that bright day on Jakku, so carefully buried in the depths of her soul so that she couldn’t find it until she had touched the lightsaber in Maz’s basement, where her parents had left her behind in the sands.

She’d wanted them to come back. She’d wanted to see them again so very badly. But no matter how hard she’d wished and waited, nothing had changed. They were gone. _Why did I wait? Why didn’t I go look for them? Look for Kira?_

How could she have found them, though? She was just a child. Maybe after all this is over, she and Kira can go find them. They’d found each other again, after all? Why not their parents?

He does come back out of the cockpit after a while. She doesn’t know exactly how long. He doesn’t try to talk to her but he climbs up onto the bunk above her. She hears him shift overhead, then go still. Before long, his breathing is steady.

It grates how quickly he fell asleep. She wants to sleep so badly, and there’s Kylo, asleep in five seconds. 

She gets off the bunk and goes out into the cockpit and stares out at the swirling blue lights of hyperspace.

Rey’s used to brightness. The sands of the Jakku desert were white, and reflected the hot light of the sunshine right back up into her eyes. She’d worn tinted goggles on the brightest days and it had still been too bright for her eyes. The blue before her is bright, and cool, and swirling, almost like the water in the lake on Takodana, but not quite. She’d wanted to dive into that lake. But it feels almost like she’s spinning as the stars curl around the ship.

She leans her head back against the seat.

It’s hypnotic, the way the light is spinning. It’s almost like a sand whorl.

It was the sand whorls that brought the end to the Empire on Jakku—that’s what they’d always said. Or maybe it was that the end of the Empire brought a sandstorm the likes of which Jakku had never known—enough to bury star destroyers and to kill hundreds of thousands of soldiers. She still could find their armor sometimes, like how she’d found Raeh’s helmet. 

She could see them now, somehow, fighting in her mind’s eye, ships that twisted and turned over the sands, firing blasts at her the way those TIE’s had shot at her and Finn as they’d tried to make their exit on the Falcon. Except their blasts sound like laughter—a dry, rolling laughter, cold and yet positively gleeful as if it glorified in the destruction that echoed off walls that didn’t exist in the sands…

The next thing Rey’s aware of is Kylo slapping her cheek lightly. “Wake up,” he says sharply.

There are no blue lights in front of her and there’s something damp on her face. Tears? She darts her tongue out. 

Blood.

“What—?”

“Have you never heard of hyper rapture?” He sounds angry and yet worried somehow. He was worried about her.

She blinks.

He must have carried her out into the cabin because there’s no more swirling light and she feels the sturdy warmth of his body around her. Her eyes keep losing focus and it’s hard for her to breathe, to keep her head upright. 

“It’s ok,” he murmurs her, almost gentle now. He’s trying to soothe her. And his voice is soft enough and her mind is confused enough that she lets herself be soothed. “Lie down.”

She does and he summons some wipes to begin to clean the blood off her face. Her skin erupts into gooseprickles as he tucks loose strands of her hair behind her ear. This is the closest he’s been to her since he invaded her mind. His hands are oddly gentle, his touch warm, and his lips are right there and by the time she realizes she’s staring at them, she decides it’s easier to keep doing it and let the daze take over than to look away blushing.

“It makes you lose your mind if you stare at it too long,” he warns her. “It’ll damage your eyes and nervous system, and it’ll shake your cognitive functioning the longer you stare at it. Drink.” He shoves a straw between her lips.

Water is the sweetest drink there is. She’d seen the life forms at Maz’s drinking other things than water, but water is the perfect drink. She sucks at the straw and her eyes drift shut again and this time, as her mind fades into whatever it fades into, there’s no echoing laughter in her ears.

**Kylo**

Kylo’s never slept well in his life. He’s a light sleeper—and a jumpy one ever since Luke. And he’d never been gladder of it than when he’d heard the thunk of Rey sliding out of that chair in the cockpit, covered in her own blood and twitching and murmuring in her unconsciousness that it wasn’t over, that it’d never be over.

He covers her in a blanket again as she loses consciousness again and watches her sleep for a long while, testing her Force signature with his own. It’s pulsing and—insofar as it’s possible for a Force signature to feel feverish—it feels feverish. 

She looks so small, curled up there on the bunk. It’s a sign of how out of it she must have been that she’d let him carry her to the bunk, wipe blood from her face, and give her water.

She needs a teacher. There’s so much she just doesn’t know. If she hadn’t known not to stare out into hyperspace like that, what else is she ignorant of? And she _needs_ to learn how to control the Force. Whatever she says, she _can’t_ teach herself, and even a loathsome teacher is better than nothing, isn’t it? 

He leaves some of the food she’d gotten at the diner at her side in case she wakes up hungry (likely, given what she’d just done to her body) and goes into the cockpit. He pulls them out of hyperspace and everything slows. Then he checks the holoport for messages.

“Veesh,” he says when he connects with the holo.

“Sir,” Veesh says as a response. The connection is spotty, his voice sounds garbled and not just because of his mask. “We were unable to salvage anything from Starkiller Base.”

Kylo is unsurprised by this somehow. 

“How many died?”

“Most,” Veesh replies, almost uncaringly. “We were able to evacuate most of our senior staff before the planet’s core exploded.”

“The Supreme Leader must be thrilled.” How much time and money had gone into building the thing? And the Resistance had, on the first attempt, destroyed it. His mother had probably thought it was old hat, going in and destroying a super weapon like that. She was probably thrilled right now, proud of herself and her men, reveling in her victory over him and his.

And what was more, he couldn’t even begrudge her for it. He’d _hated_ Hux’s little pet project from the start. _Yes, give them a big target to destroy, a beast to slay and they’ll do it. _And how many millions had died—both in the Hosnian System and on the base itself? What a waste of time, resources, and life.

But every time he’d voiced that distaste, he’d gotten a sneer from Hux and the accusation from his master—_so does Leia Organa’s son live on in that helmet? _It fills him with rage, even now, thinking of those words. Organa means _nothing_ to him. He is not the weak boy that was Ben Solo. The Supreme Leader is wise, and had saved him from a life of misuse and misery by showing him the path to the darkness. It was _not_ loyalty to Organa and her naïve view of the galaxy to say that Starkiller Base had been a waste. That was a truth that was now irrefutable. 

But the Supreme Leader had never seen it as Kylo’s place to question him. Had Vader questioned the Emperor his decision to make not one but two Death Stars? Or had he humbly accepted the vision of a better man?

He takes a slow breath while Veesh considers his words. 

“He is livid,” Veesh replies at last. Livid must be an understatement, then. “But I’m sure he will have his way soon enough. We have complete faith in Kira Ren to be able to complete her mission.”

“I suppose it just got more urgent, since we don’t have backup plans for Starkiller,” Kylo says, trying to sound idle, trying to convince himself that he’s idle and that he isn’t suddenly feeling too warm. _Don’t lose control in front of a subordinate._

Ironically, a lesson from his mother. His leg starts twitching, jiggling up and down from nervous tension. _She’s going to die. Kira is going to kill her._

This is necessary. Let the past die. He can’t be who he was meant to be while they are still alive—any of them.

“More urgent indeed,” Veesh agrees. “He is electing that we not pursue the Resistance as they flee their current base.”

“You think he is wrong to do this?” Kylo asks sharply. Something in Veesh’s tone doesn’t sound right.

“Oh, the Supreme Leader is certainly a more capable visionary than me,” Veesh says at once. “But I worry that in focusing on regrouping, we miss an opportunity—not just to behead the Resistance, but to utterly destroy it. But he thinks we don’t need the dreadnaughts at this time, and who am I to tell him otherwise.”

“Who indeed,” Kylo murmurs. “It’s better this way. Knowing Organa’s leadership, they might well do something stupid like try to destroy one and we really can’t afford to have the Resistance take out a Dreadnaught after destroying Starkiller. That will signal to the galaxy that the Supreme Leader is weak.”

“Do you think he is weak?” Veesh asks.

“I think the Supreme Leader is wise in all things, and the leader the galaxy needs. He has been nothing but a sagacious and patient master.” His gut tightens at the words. He must not be weak. He must not forget his master’s trainings. He will take the hard lessons from a good master rather than the sweet lies from the hypocritical one. He would not be weak. Those lessons had shown him his own weakness and he had overcome them. He had chosen that, and does not regret it for a day. He’ll protect the First Order if it means protecting his master. That is what Vader did afterall. Vader had served Palpatine, he had not politicked. He had enforced his master’s will. “Besides, Dreadnaughts might make it hard for Kira to escape once Organa is dead.”

“Her escape should be of little consequence compared to the completion of the mission,” Veesh says uncaring. 

“All the same, I’d like my lieutenant to make it out alive if possible. I should hate to have to replace her.”

“You have a fine replacement handy,” Veesh points out, and Kylo glances back along the passageway to where Rey is asleep once again. 

“She and Kira aren’t interchangeable,” he replies, his voice clipped. “And she has years of training ahead of her before she is even remotely as capable as her sister.” 

“But do you deny that the mission is more important than her life?” Veesh presses and there’s a light fluttering of the Force against his mind and Kylo snaps his attention back to Veesh, slamming his defenses down over the clone’s probing. 

What was Veesh Ren doing, trying to probe him like that? And if he could reach him at that distance, that meant the knight was far more powerful than Kylo had previously thought. As far as he knew, only Snoke had that kind of power. _Perhaps Veesh has been training with him in my absence. _But he'd only been gone a few days. “Are you questioning my commitment, Ren?” 

“Hardly,” Veesh says smoothly. “Merely that your attachment might be blinding you to the risks that would come should she not succeed in killing Organa. But I’m sure I don’t need to remind you of those.”

No, he doesn’t. His mother is too clever by a half, and too convincing. No matter what the galaxy might think of her following the reveal of her bloodline, she’s a snake who can get anyone to agree with her. And if she can keep on surviving, keep on making it through, those who want to hear what she has to say will always listen to her, and there will be more pain, destruction, death, war—endless attempts to put off order, to keep chaos alive. 

The longer she lives, the longer Kylo will keep feeling these pangs of pain every time he remembers that she is a liar. She lied to him. She pushed him away. She didn’t want him. Had she been lying every time she had said it was for his own good? Had she ever loved him? Ever wanted him? Because he knows how matter much she would protest that he is wrong about it, she never had.

And if she was a terrible mother, what does she have to redeem herself from being his enemy?

No, he doesn’t need to be reminded of any of this. Soon she’ll be dead and he’ll be better for it. 

He takes a steadying breath. Yes, he can use his rage and pain to power him, but he also must learn to control himself. Veesh is clever enough to use any weakness he sees against him one day. It’s not a comforting thought to have about anyone who reports into him. Hell, it’s not a comforting thought to have about anyone—Hux, Luke, Rey…

“Anything to report from Kon, Xetrad, Ydram-Pu, and Griotaru?” He hadn’t heard from his other knights before leaving and with the rush of the planet being destroyed, he hadn’t told them _that_ he was going. But Veesh will have answered those questions when the others checked in. It’s not the way Kylo would have wanted it done, but they hadn’t had a lot of choice in the matter.

“No sir. Xetrad is still looking for younglings, Ydram-Pu and Griotaru are training on Base one-three-nine-eight-four and Kon is still in talks with the Hutts.”

He pauses before asking the next question. “And any word from Kira?” 

“She reported in once when they landed at the Rebel base, but I haven’t heard from her since. My guess is the Resistance is decamping and she’ll make a connection when they’ve resettled.”

“Indeed,” Kylo says. 

“And how is…” Veesh begins, his voice trailing away suggestively.

“She stared at hyperspace too long and is now unconscious,” Kylo says. He glances back over his shoulder. Way in the back of the cabin, Rey has not moved at all. The straw connected to the thermos of water is still half in her mouth.

“No trouble?”

“Not yet. I think she knows she’ll be in bigger trouble if she hurts me than if she doesn’t,” he says. “And I think she’ll realize she wants to learn. She’s thirsty for recognition.” _Like me._

“Very good,” Veesh replies. His voice is perfectly smooth now.

“Convey my greetings to the Supreme Leader,” he says.

“I will, sir,” Veesh says. 

“That’s all,” Kylo tells him.

“Very good, sir, and may the Force—”

“Yeah,” Kylo says, and kills the holo. He hates the way that Veesh always says _May the Force be with you. _It reminds him of his mother.

His mother who will be dead soon. 

He puts the ship back in hyperspace and drifts back to his bunk. 

He doesn’t fall asleep easily this time. Rey is snoring lightly and it keeps distracting him.

His dad used to snore—much louder than Rey’s snores, but all the same.

It always is hardest to sleep when he’s thinking about his family.

**Kira**

_Be__ quick about it_ is what every ounce of training tells her. In and out, a quick death, a confusing one. Choke her with the Force—Vader’s chosen way of doing things, a nice ironic note that the Supreme Leader will appreciate—then make it look like she had a heart attack. In and out, then when things are falling apart, pretend to get overwhelmed and break it off with Finn and run away. Back to Jakku for all he knows, or just lost to the stars forever.

Or she could murder Leia Organa this morning with her brother’s own lightsaber. She won’t do it—it’s far too reckless, but she will confess the imagery of it all is even more satisfying to her than killing her the way Vader killed his enemies. Luke had tried to murder the son she hadn’t even cared about. He could have gotten away with murder. Because he would have, if he’d killed Kylo. No one would have batted a kriffing eyelash—not even Kylo’s own mother. She thinks about it every time Luke’s lightsaber bounces off her hip.

Be quick about it, get it over with, be the weapon you’ve been trained to be since you were small.

Except she isn’t quick about it. She doesn’t even force choke Leia Organa, make it look like a heart attack. She doesn’t have a blaster misfire, doesn’t stab her through the heart with the blue-bladed lightsaber.

She doesn’t really know why—at least that’s what she tells herself. Leia Organa means nothing to her at all. If she means anything, it should be something horrible—a mother who lied to and abandoned her son. 

Except that the woman gives her a maternal smile whenever she sees her, and asks her how she’s feeling amidst all the hustle and bustle of packing up the moveable feast that is their Resistance base. How can she be the same woman as the one from memories of Kylo when he’d been Ben, brooding because his mother had lied to him, and had she really been pretending to care this whole time? How quickly she’d foisted him off on Luke. To learn control? Or to hide the truth of Vader? Had she ever cared? Had she ever loved him?

Kira’s a good liar, and more importantly, she is very good at sensing when someone is lying to her. And for all of Kylo’s assertions that his own mother is a liar, she doesn’t think that the woman is lying to her in the kindnesses she’s showing now. Why would she lie to the Jakku scavenger who’d been tortured by her son? Easier to lie to the son whose darkness you never understood, feared, rejected, after all. Better than her own mother in name only. At least her mother had had the good taste to kriff off and stay away from her life forever. 

But there is a path to darkness there, and memories that give her headaches and more confusing thoughts about Rey and a planet that’s too hot, too bright, and too dry, and wondering if her mother had loved either of them at all. And every time she thinks about it in those terms for just a moment, her skin goes a little clammy.

If she’s scrambling to redeem someone through a comparison to her own mother, she must truly be scrambling. Whatever small kindnesses Leia Organa is showing her now is nothing in the face of Kylo’s pain at her hands. Nothing. 

She’d never forgive him if he showed an ounce of mercy to her own mother. So she can’t break in her own task now. She must remember that. That more than anything else must be her guide as she gets her bearings in the Resistance base.

And yet, instead of thinking about how to be quick about killing Organa, she thinks about escape paths. How to be subtle about it and make sure she can get back out alive. 

Something that’s impossible as the Resistance is moving its base out of the jungles of D’Qar.

“All hands on deck,” Poe Dameron tells her when she offers to help. Help, she tells herself, will mean that she’s learning the layout of the Resistance. She’ll pass on infrastructural intel that Hux’s Legions will be able to use to quash the rebellion for once and for all once Organa is dead. It’s more than she’s been asked to do, and she’s loathe to help Hux because he is so very condescending, but if she does, it will reflect well on Kylo and the other Knights of Ren. A weapon who can think for herself, who can serve the cause, whose loyalty will be without question.

This is how she ends up piloting an X-Wing offworld to fly alongside the larger transports and protect the fleet from the First Order ships that could be arriving at any moment. 

Could be—but she doesn’t know yet. She doesn’t have any idea what the plan is now that Starkiller is gone. She hasn’t had the privacy to com in and learn her orders until this exact moment. She disconnects her Resistance com and pulls out the holo that will connect her back to the Knights of Ren.

“Kira Ren,” she says to the holo and it loads for a moment. Then Veesh’s face appears.

“All well?” he asks her smoothly from beneath his helmet.

“Well enough,” she says. 

“Is Organa dead yet?”

“Not yet. She’s well guarded.”

“How hard is it to just choke her?” he asks and this is one of those things that always grates her about Veesh. He’s passive-aggressive. Which makes sense—she and Kylo just bark out their frustrations whenever they can. There’s only so much of that a team can take before the team falls apart. Veesh doesn’t want the team to fall apart, so his aggression turns passive. 

“It’d be nice to get out of here alive,” she says. “It’s not a suicide mission.”

“And you don’t think dying for the cause is worthy?”

“Not when I have so much else to offer,” she says, rolling her eyes. “Where’s Kylo?”

“Kylo?” Veesh asks. “He’s off world. Hunting for Skywalker with your sister. Didn’t he tell you?”

_No_, she thinks, immediately before thinking, _Careful. _Veesh’s head tilts to one side. She’s not wearing her helmet. Veesh has always been an observant man, and he makes a lot of everything, which means Kira’s natural inclination is to give him as little as possible.

And that Kylo hadn’t told her that he was going to hunt down Skywalker, that he was taking her sister with him…

Well it stings.

He doesn’t _have_ to tell her anything, of course, but why _wouldn’t_ he tell her this? She’d been the one to find him on that rainy night with the temple burning all around them and the other students dead. His eyes had been dead, numb, his face a mask of rage and pain and she’d believed him because what else could possibly have made him do this? 

She could have told him…words that were meaningless, ultimately. Words that meant nothing compared to the simple fact that he knew she was behind him, the way she knew he was behind her.

“No,” she replies at last, her voice as expressionless as possible. “He must have gotten that order after he gave me mine.”

“Must have,” Veesh replies evenly. “I think he plans to try and seduce your sister to the dark side.”

“I wish him luck with it,” Kira says, her voice a little more clipped than she wants it to be. 

“I’m sure he won’t replace you until she’s properly trained,” Veesh tells her dryly.

“I’m sure he won’t replace me at all. You certainly haven’t ever been successful in taking my place,” and she switches off the holo.

_Seduce her to the dark side._

She snorts.

Between the stubborn defiance Rey had shown in that interrogation room and Kylo’s complete inability to be anything other than painfully direct, she couldn’t even fathom what kind of a seduction that would be. Probably him just prodding her until she agreed to let him teach her—something that would probably take about ninety years because if the sands of Jakku hadn’t worn her out, Kylo Ren certainly never would.

_He’s not going to replace me_, she thinks as she turns the Resistance comm back on. _Rey and I aren’t the same person. It’s not a one’s the same as two sort of deal._

Her throat tightens.

Cold fury floods her and stays with her until she’s landed her X-Wing safely in one of the docking bays on the transport. She descends from the ship, her hands not quite balled into fists, her mind focused in a way that only happens when she is feeling the true darkness, rage and bitter blackness.

_Careful, _she reminds herself as she sweeps her awareness out throughout the ship. _Leia Organa might sense it. You need her trust._

She takes a deep breath, and then another.

She tries to remember Master Luke’s words without letting the fury in. _Balance. Don’t let your anger and hatred govern your actions._

_Kriff off, you hypocrite, _she mutters to herself. It’s easier to feel anger towards Master Luke on Ben’s behalf than it is to try and shove the old wounds back under their scar tissue.

“Justice for others is easier than justice for the self.”

She whirls around and sees Leia Organa staring at her.

_Kriff._

Leia holds out a hand to her and, confused, Kira takes it. “You aren’t angry with what happened to you on Starkiller, are you?” She blinks at her, keeping her face as still as possible. “Han told me that you didn’t have anyone on Jakku. That you wanted to go back and wait for someone who left you there. But they’re never coming back, are they?”

Kira’s eyes sting.

_Rey came back._

_She was the one I didn’t expect to come back. _

So much so she’d told herself Rey was a clone rather than remember her, try to find her.

“Sweetheart.”

Why are Leia Organa’s arms around her now? Why is she being held as though she’s a child that needs comforting from her mother? Why is she—

“Come with me,” Leia says gently. “Let’s get some water on your face.”

Kira hasn’t cried since she was six, not since they left Rey behind. It feels like something’s broken in her, something she doesn’t even begin to know how to understand. 

“I—” she says and Leia turns to look at her.

_She’s your target._

“I—thank you. I’m—I—” and she turns away from the General, hurries off in she doesn’t even know what direction, throws herself into the first fresher she can find to gather herself together.

_She’s not your mother, _she tells herself. _She’s not _his_ mother either. She’s a target. She’s a target._

She looks at herself in the mirror. Her eyes are bright and red and her face is splotchy. 

Now she really looks like Rey.

Rey was always the one who cried.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Hyper Rapture](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Hyper-rapture)


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AO3 spent a long time pretending that chapter 4 wasn't published, so if you missed last week's chapter, I'd pop back and take a look at that one!

**Rey**

The laughter echoes through the cabin as she paces back and forth. In the hallway, Kylo is doing some sort of stretching. He’s shed his black quilted coat and cowl and is wearing a dark undershirt that grows more and more stained with sweat as he moves. It clings to his chest and it distracts her as she paces far more than she wants it to—as if the way his arms are bulging doesn’t distract her.

She’s not used to seeing a man made of muscle. Plutt’s goons are too underfed to come close to this. 

Periodically, he brushes his sweaty hair out of his eyes before continuing with whatever training he’s doing.

Rey wishes she had her staff.

Or—perhaps more importantly—Rey wishes she had the room to maneuver her staff.

The trouble is that there’s not enough room to swing a cat on this shuttle. It had seemed huge to her at first—bigger than the quod jumpers she’d helped Plutt fix, if smaller than the _Falcon_. Seating up front, benches that line the walkway back to the bunks, and then space for the bunks. There’s a fresher and a kitchenette, as well. 

But after three days spent almost entirely in hyperspace, Rey’s starting to get a little bit stir crazy. This is longer than ever she’d spent in her AT-AT during a sandstorm, only with less space to move. And with the company of someone whose company she distinctly does not want. Who is made of muscle, and stretches and trains every day and fills the ship with a the tangy but not unpleasant smell of exercise—which fades with time but never completely goes away. Traveling with Finn on the _Millennium Falcon_ had been a million times better. At least there was space on the _Falcon_, and Finn could make her laugh, made her feel warm and safe, even as her gut told her that she needed to get back to Jakku, back to a place where her family could find her.

There’d be plenty of room if only she could go into the cockpit—but she never does, not after that first moment of hyper rapture. Especially since that laughter hasn’t gone away.

He finishes his exercises for the day and goes to the fresher to wash away his sweat and change his clothes. And it’s as the water starts to run that she drops to the floor and does fifteen push-ups.

Yes. 

That feels better. Moving her body. 

She wasn’t made for a sedentary life. The only days she hadn’t moved were stormy ones, or when she’d been held captive. She does some more push-ups, then twists over and does some sit-ups. She does some of the stretches she’d taught herself from a training manual she’d found in the sands and then pops herself up into a handstand, her stomach tightening to make sure she was balancing properly, her lungs moving steadily within her as her heart pounded blood straight to her head.

The door to the fresher hisses open and she hears Kylo’s “What the—” before she lets herself down with a controlled fall, landing in a plank and dropping down to a push-up again.

She can feel his eyes on her as she goes.

No one’s ever watched her intently, and she can tell he’s gauging her movements, assessing her form because it’s not long before he says, again, “You need a teacher.”

“I do not,” she replies.

“You keep doing the same four things over again. You’ll make yourself stronger if you—”

“There’s not a lot of maneuverability here. I’d do more if there was more space.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah,” she snaps. “I’ll show you the next time we land.”

“Will you?”

“Yes.”

“And what about the Force, will you show me how adeptly you’ve taught yourself then as well?”

“I don’t need _you_ to teach me. And I don’t _want_ you to.”

A flash of frustration crosses his face. “You don’t even know what you don’t know. Even _you_ have to realize that you’ll never be all you can be until you have someone to teach you.”

“I’d rather not know than turn into a monster like you.”

“And a monster like Kira?”

“Shut up,” she growls angrily.

“I have trained your sister. You don’t like that do you. That she cares about me, that she trusts me.”

“Shut _up!_” This time she yells it. Her heart is hammering in her chest, her face is flushed. _Why_ does he have to keep reminding her that he’s known her sister this whole time and Rey hadn’t even let herself remember her? She hadn’t had friends until Finn, and doesn’t even know if Finn cares about her the way she cared about him. He’d wanted to leave, after all, just like everyone else. She hopes he’s safe, wherever he is. She hopes that he’d gotten what he’d wanted in the end, and that if he’d had to leave, at least he was happy.

She glares at Kylo Ren, breathing unsteadily. Why does he have to keep staring at her like this, why does he have to be there at all? Why did he have to take her with him?

_Because Kira wanted to keep you safe._

_And she trusts him._

“Go away,” she mutters at last, turning her back on him and lying down on the ground to do some more twists. 

He doesn’t go away, though. He keeps watching her. She does her best to ignore him as she moves between motions until she’s feeling tired. If it weren’t for his presence, and the fact that she’s in cold, dark space, she’d almost feel normal. But with him standing there, she can tell he’s just watching her, preparing for a day that will never happen when watching her will mean he can train her more effectively.

When she’s done, she sits down on her bunk and is about to let a relaxed sleep wash over her when Kylo says, “There’s a towel for you in the fresher.”

Her eyes snap open.

The fresher?

“Yes, the fresher,” he says. “You should use it.”

“Do we have enough water for that?” she asks slowly. He uses it every day, and Rey really doesn’t need it. She’s never needed it.

He seems to think otherwise.

“It’s water recycling,” he shrugs. “Cleans out the dirty water and reuses the fresh. We’ll dump the waste when we get to the next port.

“Oh,” she replies. “I—ok.”

Which is how she ends up in a fresher for the first time in her life, staring at several different buttons and nozzles she has no idea how to use.

She swallows.

She is _not _going to be daunted by this of all things. Not even a little bit.

So she strips out of Kira’s black clothes, folding them gently and placing them on a hook and—

She yelps.

A nozzle has emitted from the ship and is spraying down the clothes, the scent of something chemical filling her nose.

“What’s wrong?” Kylo calls through the door.

“Nothing,” she snaps at him. She leans forward and smells the clothes. There’s no scent of her sweat at all.

“Ok,” she mutters to herself. “Ok.”

She turns, naked, towards the shower and presses one of the buttons. Water streams out of it—too hot. She hisses when she steps under it and turns a lever. The water cools—too cold now and a squeal escapes her lips as she adjusts it again, goose bumps erupting across her body, her nipples tightening on her chest as she eases the lever towards warm again. 

The water is now close to ok and she reaches for some soap and begins to wash it over her body. The water runs positively brown from the caked up dirt on her skin, and her hair starts to slip out of the buns she’s kept it in since she was small enough that her mother still sat with her while she took baths with her sister.

She swallows.

There. She’s clean now. Right?

Certainly cleaner than she’s ever been before in her entire life. She sniffs under her arms and turns off the water. 

When she emerges from the Fresher, Kylo’s lying on his bunk, reading something off a datapad.

“Sounded like an adventure,” he says dryly.

Rey glares at him by way of response. “Not all of us are used to showering every day,” she snaps.

He looks away from the pad. Then he nods slowly. “Well, take as many as you’d like,” he says. “Like I said, the water’s not in limited supply.”

Rey looks down at her hands. They’re pink and there’s no dirt under her fingernails and while her palms are still calloused, somehow her skin feels softer than it’s ever felt in her life.

“Yeah, ok,” she mumbles as she climbs onto the bunk. Is she imagining it, or does it feel different now that she’s clean?

**Finn**

“Don’t you think that we got out a little too quickly?” It’s been eating at him ever since they made it off D’Qar. There’d been no waiting armada of Star Destroyers, not even a lonely TIE spies. The stars had been empty. 

Poe glances over at him. They’re looking out over one of the training decks where the new recruits are drilling. There aren’t a lot of new recruits, and Poe had seemed surprised that Finn wasn’t quite ready to go out there and train with them. “Let me just get my bearings,” Finn had lied, and Poe had nodded. If he’d found Finn’s reticence confusing, he had let it go. Finn had just gotten back from Starkiller Base. Poe wasn’t questioning his loyalty or commitment just yet.

“What do you mean?”

“It feels almost like they let us go. I was expecting them to send…I don’t know.” A whole host of Star Destroyers. Or a Dreadnaught. Pick them out of the stars and you don’t have to risk losing any of your infantry.

Poe shrugs. “They just didn’t catch up in time. We moved really fast.”

Finn grimaces. That doesn’t seem right to him. Not at all. But he lets it go when Poe asks, “What do you think?” He jerks his head towards the training recruits and Finn watches them for a moment before saying, 

“They’re dead meat.”

Poe frowns. “What makes you say that?”

“They’re training for one on one combat, not lines of soldiers,” he replies. “They’ll get gunned down so fast.”

“That’s what the Rebellion did,” Poe replies. “You don’t give them a line to gun down. They’re a machine and you’re the rock that gets caught in the cog that breaks it. Guerilla warfare.”

“Maybe,” Finn says quietly. Taunul had been his first assignment. He’d never even fired a blaster at an enemy until Takodana. And how jarring it had been, to have the word _traitor! _shouted at him by someone whose life he once would have wanted to defend as they tried to kill him with every ounce of their capacity. Who was he to say he knew what would work well against a regiment of Stormtroopers? “Except I don’t think that this is helpful.”

“What’s helpful?”

“Everyone running on their own instinct like this,” he says. “There should at least be some formations, shouldn’t there?”

Poe claps him on the shoulder. “There are,” he grins. “Keep watching, you’ll see.”

And Finn does. He watches the soldiers reset themselves and there they go again, spreading out, hiding, ducking. They don’t call out formations to one another but after the third or fourth bout, he sees that there are, in fact, formations.

Interesting.

He watches them repeat, and repeat, and repeat. 

He feels like one of the officers, staring out over the masked troopers, unable to differentiate between them beyond their performance. He remembers Phasma barking out orders, generals and commandants in their dark uniforms taking notes on data pads. Once, even Kira Ren had stopped by, her black helmet shining and smooth. Finn remembered his throat going dry and trying not to think about what would happen if he ever got on the bad side of a Knight of Ren. 

The thought is not a comforting one. Kira Ren had been watching to see how effective they’d all be at exterminating the enemies of the First Order. He’s not doing that, is he? There’s a difference between that and this, right? This is to survive, right? 

But in war, survival means killing your enemies before they kill you just as much in the Resistance as it does in the First Order.

He remembers FN-4983 and the way he’d always laughed when people farted, FN-8221 and how he’d always managed to get extra rations and would share them with anyone who asked. 

_No, they’re just training to kill them. People like you. Cogs in the machine._

What happens if the machine doesn’t break and everyone becomes a cog of death? Who has to die to break the machine? 

He turns away from the training, something lodging uncomfortably in his throat. He doesn’t want to think about them like this. Not the Resistance fighters, not the Stormtroopers he’d turned his back on. 

So he goes to find Rey.

Rey’s been crying.

Finn doesn’t know why, but he doesn’t need to know why.

_Treat her like normal, _he tells himself. So he sits next to her and chats with her about the ship she’d flown. Was it natural, after flying the _Falcon_? Did she want to fly more? Does she like being on a ship this big? 

She doesn’t reply much, but she does take his hand again, and give him a smile that he thinks means _I don’t really want to talk right now, but thank you_. 

“It’s so cute that you two have found one another,” Tallie says and Finn nearly jumps out of his skin. Rey’s hand is still in his, and suddenly he is _very_ aware of it. The solidness of the grip, the warmth of her palm pressed to his. “Sort of like something out of a story.”

“Found each other?” Finn asks, coughing. His throat is too dry right now.

“You know,” and Tallie looks between the two of them and Finn is too aware of his own skin right now. There’s so much of it, covering every bit of him. Why does he have so much skin? “I feel like one day they’ll tell stories about it, like Han Solo finding the General and how they fell in love and—”

“We’re not together,” Finn says at once, a little too loudly, a little too aware of Rey’s hand in his. 

He almost thinks he doesn’t hear it, the way Rey’s breath catches lightly in her throat. A little _oh_ of surprise, confusion—hurt?

“I mean,” Finn says turning to look at her but she’s looking down at their hands. She is slowly removing it and blinking too fast and biting her lip and getting up. “Rey—” he says sharply but she’s already getting to her feet and how does she move so kriffing fast? “Wait—Rey—”

He doesn’t even have time to process Tallie’s “Sorry! I didn’t mean to—” But he can’t find her anywhere. She’s completely disappeared and Finn curses.

_Great_.

He doesn’t even begin to know where to go to look for her now. She could be anywhere on the dang ship. _How_ does she move so fast? He remembers sprinting full out on Jakku, unable to keep up with her. 

_Sand,_ his mind supplies. _Resistance makes you stronger._

It's useless when it comes to finding her though, and he looks for nearly half an hour before sighing and giving up.

As if she weren’t already upset about—well—everything now. As if she didn’t have the memories of Kylo Ren haunting her at every turn.

His hand tightens into a fist.

Kylo Ren hadn’t killed him for not firing in Tanaul, but now Finn wishes he _had_ fired that blaster—right into Kylo’s helmet. It would have saved Rey so much trouble.

Except she’d still be on Jakku. They wouldn’t have found one another and no one would know either of them existed, uch less think that they’re—

Nope. Nope he’s not thinking about that until he’s talked to her. He refuses.

He’ll focus on Kylo Ren. Kylo Ren and how, more likely than not, he’d be dead, because Kylo would have frozen that blast the way he had frozen Poe’s. _I’ll kill him one day, _Finn thinks angrily.

Easier to focus on those confusing twin desires than that he’d gone and made things harder for Rey. That he’d hurt her because she’d run off before he could explain that—

They just haven’t _talked_ about it. He likes her hand in his, had been so _relieved_ when he’d found her on Starkiller Base, how glad he’d been to hold her—to just know she was ok.

And now he’s thinking about her dry sense of humor and how it makes him smile, the muted twinkle of her eyes as though she’s enjoying a joke that only she knows and yes—it might be something that’s changed in the robust way she’d been before Starkiller but it’s—well—

It's confusing.

Everything’s confusing.

And he wants to find her but until he does there’s nothing he can do. 

Which is just par for the course for him, really. Rey’s the only person who’s ever made him feel like he could _do_ something. He could rescue her if he tried hard enough, he could take a stand and fight those who had once been his brothers in arms after they’d destroyed Maz’s castle on Takodana. He hadn’t been able to fire one single blast at Taunul. He wanted to stay alive, to keep himself above water. But every time he thought of what Kylo had done to Rey, there it was again, that boiling rage, that urge to kill. Where had _that_ been at Taunul? He’s not a hero, but sometimes with Rey he feels like he could be.

And like the not-hero that he is, he gives up on trying to find her. Rey’d grown up among the skeletons of star ships, he’s sure that if she doesn’t want to be found, he won’t be able to find her. So he turns back into the bowls of the ship. 

His bunk is in close quarters with some of the other soldiers, but it’s still more space than he ever got as a Stormtrooper. The bunk feels softer, too, even though he’s sure that’s just his imagination. The water in the fresher will probably feel warmer against his body, too, and the rations seem tastier in his memory. 

But even as he’s lying there in his bunk alongside a new set of people to fight alongside, there’s a little voice in the back of his mind.

_You should leave. It’ll be safer elsewhere. _He’d told that to Rey on the landing strip on D’Qar. For all he couldn’t stop thinking about it now, he’d meant it as a solace then. But if he brought it up again now, would she even consider it? It would have been hard enough to convince her before he’d gone and put his foot in his damn mouth? She was brave, and didn’t give up on a fight—except when Kylo had crushed her spirits. 

And there it was again, spinning anger and confusion—a cycle. If they fled together, it might not be together in the way that Rey wanted because what if she was too embarrassed by all this to actually talk to him about it? If they fled together, it would be because of Kylo, but not because of Kylo in the way that Finn wanted. Did that matter? Or did it make it cowardice? Cowardice to be running away from the man who’d crushed her, rather than standing up to him; or just smart, because not picking a fight you can’t win and living means that you’re still alive at the end of the day.

Poe would get it. Finn had helped him escape, after all, he’d get wanting to flee the First Order, to be free of it. Or would he think that the only way to really be free was to stay and fight? 

_There’s no beating them. Just hiding._

Finn remembers training with his blaster, the lines of soldiers, the formations shouted from chrome-domed captains. Nothing bends them, nothing breaks them. They move as one, with a chain of command that can’t be questioned. Questions don’t lead to discharge or a court martialing. They lead to death.

_If they find me, I’m dead._

And if they find Rey? If they kill her, or torture her, and he didn’t do anything to stop them?

_Running is doing something to stop them, to protect her, _he tells himself, tossing onto his side and punching his pillow down. 

Surely there has to be some lonely planet somewhere in this galaxy where Kylo Ren can’t find them.

**Kira**

Kira feels like she’s avoiding _everyone_ now.

Leia Organa, who had made her cry and had seen right through her in that moment. Finn who, apparently, isn’t Rey’s boyfriend.

Because of _course_ he wasn’t Rey’s boyfriend. He’d known Rey for, what, three days? Even if it was an intense three days, she doubted very much that the connection her sister had yearned for in her was something she’d extend outside of the twin sister she’d never thought to see again. She doubted Jakku was the sort of place that fostered trust. She doubted that someone who’d been abandoned by her family was the _sort_ to trust. Even if she’d liked Finn, she’d probably have been cautious, have been—

Finn cares about her, though. That much is clear. The way he’d hugged her, the way he’d tried to distract her from the darker corners of her own mind, the way he always checked in on her wherever they were.

He was a sweet man. A kind man. A _good_ man. For all he was a traitor.

And his smile—when he smiled—was nothing short of beautiful.

_Stop it, _Kira berates herself. _Stop that now._

It would do her absolutely no good to think about Finn’s smile. As if she needed more to distract her from her mission. A mission she was—very clearly—failing at because she was avoiding her target like a frightened girl. 

Luckily, it’s easy to avoid both Leia Organa _and_ Finn because there’s plenty to do aboard the ship, especially since Poe Dameron seems determined that she be one of his fighters now that he’s seen what Finn means—she’s a natural in the cockpit. She’s never been gladder of that in her life than she is when it means she doesn’t have to think about her feelings anymore. She’s a good weapon. She doesn’t like feeling feelings. They get in the way of far too much. If she hadn’t learned this from her parents, she’d have absolutely have learned that from Kylo. She loves him like a brother, but sometimes he feels too much.

She’s feeling too much right now.

And she doesn’t like it.

“You’re like Luke Skywalker,” he tells her as he assigns her to Red Five, Luke’s old call number during the Rebellion. “Coming out of nowhere from a back-star planet with incredible piloting skills. You secretly a Jedi too? We could use one of those.”

Kira gives him the laugh that she knows he’s expecting and tries not to let the weight of the helmet he’s handed her weigh her down.

_Red Five._

_I am not you, _she snaps angrily at the memory of Luke Skywalker.

And the memory of Leia’s words from the day before fill her mind. _ Justice for others is easier than justice for the self._

She’d never thought much about justice before. Justice wasn’t her job. She was a Knight of Ren. She was an enforcer, one of the most elite Force users in the galaxy. She was powerful, but never once had something like _justice_ ever crossed their minds. That wasn’t part of the job description. They served the Supreme Leader. If he wanted justice of them, then it was _his_ justice, not something she should claim for herself. That isn’t her place. That isn’t her job. She is just a soldier in the end, if a good one. 

Kylo though—

And she pauses. 

Kylo might want justice. He might even be able to claim it. That was what he was doing now, right? Seeking justice against Skywalker? That was right. He was doing the right thing.

And she’d be doing the same if she could. Because yes, she wants justice for Kylo. She wanted to survive, but she’d seen the pain and rage in his face and had known that his pain and rage—well, it might know some vengeance. She’d never get that for hers.

_I hope he murders you, _she thinks angrily at the helmet she’s still holding in her hands.

Surely Rey will understand that, if she understands that it’s justice, and not murder? She doesn’t want her sister to hate Kylo. Hatred is painful, after all, and she’d spare Rey that emotion if she could.

Or maybe it’s all too late, and Rey’s hated from the day they left her behind.

_And I hope you died in a pauper’s grave for that drinking money you sold her for._

Justice for Kylo, justice for Rey—but there’s no whisper in her mind about justice for her.

She puts the helmet on. This one fits better than the one they’d given her to get off world. That had been the first helmet they could find. This one’s the one they had in her size. It doesn’t fit like a glove, per se—doesn’t fit like her Ren helmet—but it doesn’t squeeze her head too tight at least.

She works herself to the point of exhaustion, getting used to the specs on the ship that Poe has formally assigned herself, running diagnostic tests to make sure it’s not some cheap hunk of garbage that the Resistance had gotten on sale.

“You know a lot about this stuff, don’t you?” Poe asks her as she examines the underwiring.

“You pick up how ships should work when you’re breaking them apart,” she shrugs. 

The answer works for Poe and he moves on to another squadron. 

“Hey.”

And there’s Finn, standing there in his brown leather jacket he’d put around her shoulders on Starkiller Base, his face drawn and concerned. 

He’s found her at last. 

_I suppose it wasn’t realistic to think I could avoid this forever._

“Hi,” she says, crossing her arms over her chest. She looks, not at Finn’s face, but at his shoulders. They’re broader than she’d thought at first. 

“Can we…” he jerks his head towards a corner and Kira sighs and follows him. He looks around to make sure they won’t be overheard. “Did you think we were together?”

Kira swallows. She does her best to summon tears to her eyes, but now when she needs them, of course, they won’t come. “It was stupid,” she mumbles. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Rey,” Finn says and he reaches for her hand and she pulls it away from him. The _last_ thing that should happen right now is Finn getting attached to her if he’s not already. That’ll only lead to disaster. At _best_ it means he’ll end up heartbroken when the Rey he's sweet on disappears and at _worst_ it means that something bad will happen with the First Order. Because she doesn’t even begin to think he’d join it again to be close to Rey. Although that assumes that Kylo’s successful in his—“I didn’t mean to say that I wasn’t interested in it. Or didn’t want it. Just that I didn’t think that’s what we—”

“No, it’s fine,” Kira says. “Really, it’s—I was just making an assumption. There’s not a lot on Jakku for me to base stuff like this off and—”

“But—”

“Rey?”

Leia Organa is standing behind her, her face hesitant, which makes Kira that much more certain of what she wants. _Doesn’t she have better things to do right now? Things that would make the First Order want her dead?_

And _why_ does this have to be happening right now? Because this will only drag out the conversation with Finn and she _had not wanted _to continue the one with the General.

“Hi,” she says when she realizes she’s been standing silent for too long to justify staying quiet. 

“I hope you don’t mind my interrupting. I’d like to talk,” the General says gently. And Kira has no choice but to follow her. She gives Finn an apologetic look and he watches her retreat, his jaw set. She likes that so much less than when he’s smiling.

The General’s quarters are quiet, and very sparse. They remind her of Kylo’s that way. Where he could easily have justified any luxury he wanted once they’d joined Snoke, he’d always lived a rather ascetic lifestyle. The General’s quarters have a sofa, a table with some chairs and a door that leads, Kira assumes, to a bedroom. Leia sits on the sofa and Kira joins her. Everything is bright and white, and the blue lights of hyperspace filter light up the blinds that cover the duraglass windows behind them, protecting them from hyper rapture.

“I didn’t mean to break open old wounds,” Leia says carefully when they’re settled. “I know how upsetting it can be to lose people, and you are so very young.”

Kira doesn’t say anything. She looks down at her hands. _Rey wouldn’t want to talk about this, would she? _She doesn’t know. She’d freaked out and then had been ordered to leave and now Rey was with Kylo. But Kira doesn’t want to talk about it, doesn’t want to think about Rey alone on Jakku, surviving. Would it have been less cruel if she’d died?

“Family is uniformly a painful subject,” Leia continues. “We all carry our bruises in different ways. What I _meant_…” She pauses and shifts on the sofa and Kira’s eyes flick over to her. The General is fiddling with a black stone ring. “Or rather—let me start again.” She gives Kira a look she’s seen in Kylo’s eyes before. Not in many years, not since he was Ben, but a look all the same. She feels like a child again. “I shouldn’t pry. I try not to. But sometimes people are boiling with feelings. I’m not as adept at the Force as my brother or my son, but I’ve still got _some_ skill with it and I sensed that you were—” She pauses again, as though trying to determine the exact right word. Kira feels her unable to find it. “Angry. Indignant. And I thought I was helping, trying to advise you, but I realize that what you’ve gone through in your life…” She sighs. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry.”

Pry. 

_He was in my head, Kira. He’s going to kill me and either you’re one of his and you’re my enemy or you’re with me. Which is it?_

Prying, not quite invading the way that Luke had the night that Kylo had destroyed the Praxeum, but enough to learn more than Kira had wanted to give her.

She’d let her defenses down. She was stupid. Just because she wasn’t around the other Knights didn’t mean she could ever let her defenses down, and she had. And now Leia would expect to feel her, would expect to sense it, and a blank surface would give her away.

“I didn’t know you had a son,” she says slowly. _Put her on the defensive._

And exactly as Kira had intended, Leia stiffens and she’s the one sensing a flash of—

—Pain?

“Ben,” Leia says softly, and her lips twist into the saddest smile that Kira’s ever seen. “Yes, I have a son. I don’t know where he is.”

“Why not?” Kira asks, feigning confusion. Surely—_surely_—Leia Organa knows that her son is Kylo Ren. She remembers fleeting looks between Han and Leia. Yes, she definitely knows. _But she doesn’t want to tell Rey that her son tortured her. _“Did he run away?”

“I don’t know,” Leia replies slowly, and Kira’s a good liar, she knows when someone’s spinning for time. “He was training with my brother to become a Jedi Knight.”

“Kylo Ren got him?” Kira asks sharply. Rey might, conceivably, know that Kylo was also known as the Jedi Killer, even without having seen the hollow expression of his face when he’d come to the hut she was sleeping in. Lightsabers don’t drip with blood and those who kill with them, don’t get spattered the way that those stabbing with a knife might. Lightsabers cauterize the wounds they create.

“I don’t know,” Leia sighs and it’s all Kira can do to keep her eyes from narrowing. “He—well, he always had a good heart. And I refuse to believe he’s dead.” She looks at Kira stubbornly. “I refuse to believe it. I don’t know what happened to him.” _You don’t know why he went dark, don’t know that your brother wanted to murder him, don’t know the pain you caused and the damage you did by not telling him his grandfather was Darth Vader._

_But you suspect._

“I’d know if he was gone,” Leia says slowly. “But I don’t know where he is. He’s…lost, maybe. Or hiding. I don’t know. But I do know my son is out there somewhere. It breaks my heart every day—not knowing what I can do to get him back.”

_She doesn’t give a fuck about me, _she remembers Ben brooding a few weeks before the night Luke had dug into his mind. _She never told me anything and gave me away at the first opportunity. _

_She doesn’t know him, _Kira realizes slowly. She can’t even remember the last time that Leia Organa had come to visit. 

As if she’d heard the thought—even though Kira knows her defenses are high enough that she wouldn’t, knows the General isn’t prying now—the general gives her a wistful smile. “He had a little friend who wore her hair like yours,” she says. “She was always following him around like a shadow.” A cloud crosses her face. “I wonder what happened to her.” _Did the Jedi Killer destroy her along with the other students? _“Maybe that’s why I’ve cared about what’s happened to you since you. You remind me of him.”

Kira’s mouth goes dry and it takes her every inch of control that she has not to think any more about the words that had just come out of the General’s mouth. She refuses. She can’t right now. 

“Anyway,” Leia says, clearly trying to regain control of herself and the conversation. She gives Kira a steady look. “Anyway—I don’t think what happened to you, with your family—it’s not like my losing my son.” _No, it’s not, but it felt that way sometimes. Worse in some ways because he knew where you were and how to find you, but you never came back for him either. _“And I do understand if you do want to get back to Jakku to—to wait for them. But, if they’re truly gone, if they’ve truly turned their back on you and you want a place to call home away from the pain of it all, there’s a place here for you.”

_I have a place. Kylo made me one before you knew who I was._

“Thank you,” she says. “I appreciate that.”

“You don’t need to decide now,” Leia says. “But,” and she gives Kira a tentative, hesitant look, “But I do think it’s a way you can find justice for yourself. Whatever it is they did to you, it doesn’t have to define you. It’s not the way you have to keep existing. You can be free of it, if you choose.”

**Kylo**

The planet they land on has a red sky and low visibility. The ship’s sensors begin blaring almost at once from the heat of the planet and even as Kylo looks at the horizon, he sees a mountain belch out flames and magma. Behind him, Rey leans forward, staring at it.

“You’re sure there’s a port here?” she asks. The earth is ashen and blackened. There are no trees, and definitely no water. 

Kylo points towards a rocky outcropping. “There,” he says. 

Rey nods slowly. 

He doesn’t have to negotiate this time, for which he’s very glad. Apparently they get so few travelers stopping at their little home base that the locals don’t make any attempt to play him as he says they’ll need fuel and food.

“We’ve beds as well,” the translator mechanism in the ship tells him.

“We’ll sleep on our ship. Thanks though,” Kylo replies.

“Suit yourself.”

They land and before he lowers the plank for them to disembark, he hands Rey Kira’s mask.

“Put this on,” he says.

“No one’s gonna recognize us out here,” Rey says, rolling her eyes. “You didn’t make me at the—”

“There’s a low oxygen content on this planet. The mask will help you breathe.”

Rey frowns, but after a moment, she puts the mask on. He’s more than a little relieved he didn’t have to do twelve rounds of _what it looks like when your body starts to shut down due to oxygen deprivation, _especially this close to when she'd gotten hyper-rapture. 

Without the ship’s translator, it is much harder to communicate with the locals. Though humanoid, their basic isn’t…basic. He can understand it if he tries hard enough, and listens carefully, but even then, it’s not exactly easy to understand.

“What are they saying?” Rey asks.

“Something about not wanting to have any trouble,” he tells her. “I think they said something about Leader—Snoke, I’d guess—caring deeply for the planet.”

“Does he?”

“No idea. Never heard him mention it, but he’s not exactly what I’d call sentimental.” And it wasn’t as though this planet was one that would have held any fascination to him as being a part of Palpatine’s creation of the Empire. Palpatine had never spent any time mining the Unknown Regions for their resources the way that Snoke had as far as he was aware. 

Kylo raises a hand and smiles before he remembers that they can’t see him through the mask. Also why by all the stars is he smiling? He’s not his father, trying to make nice with people he doesn’t know. He’s the master of the Knights of Ren, a servant of the Supreme Leader. They should be smiling at _him_ beneath _their_ masks.

“How long?” he asks, pointing to the ship.

He gets a reply he doesn’t understand, and he glares down at the—

—Clone. The man is a clone. He has the same sort of not-quite-normal balance of life and death to him that Veesh Ren has—so subtle that you wouldn’t know that there _was_ a difference unless you were highly trained in the Force.

He frowns and reaches out with the Force, testing the life signatures of all the humanoids around him.

All of them—clones.

Strange.

Was this some sort of clone colony? What are they doing out here? 

He almost misses the man’s reply, but he’s holding up four fingers, so Kylo assumes he’d said four hours. 

“What is this place?” he asks. 

The man cocks his head. Kylo points at them all and says, “Clones.”

The man goes still and looks between him and Rey. Rey’s watching Kylo, confused. Then he begins to talk. Kylo catches the words _stormtrooper _and _escape _and he can piece a few things together from there. He doubts his mother and her friends made it easy for the clone army to integrate into normal life after the Empire, somehow. 

“Better than the Republic, then?”

“More freedom,” the man grunts, looking nervous.

“And Snoke has treated you well here,” he comments and he catches the flash of fear in the man’s eyes and stretches out with the Force. Yes. Fear. Fear for his little family, for his business if he defies the Supreme Leader at all. Mistake, maybe. Should have faced the Republic’s justice than be under Snoke’s—

Kylo turns away.

The man is a coward.

He’d wanted Freedom, and he’d gotten it. The Supreme Leader would not have treated him worse than the Republic. 

He remembers being thrown off a cliff.

No. No, he had deserved that. Organa hadn’t wanted him, would have hated him, punished him for what she would see as his weakness. He was strong. And whatever qualms he had about the Supreme Leader’s governmental decisions, those he could still unlearn. It was far more important that he not be weak. 

So he turns away from the coward and towards a watering hole that looks even more dingy and scum-ridden than the last one they’d stopped at.

“What was that about?” Rey asks him.

“They’re clones here,” he says. “I wanted to know why.”

“And?”

“Why do you care?” He can tell that she’s glaring at him behind her mask. “Curiosity, mostly. I was not part of the Supreme Leader’s forces when he was out in these parts.”

“So you wanted to confirm that he is good and noble in all things, always?” Sarcasm is dripping from her voice and Kylo can’t quite catch the way his lips twitch in a frown, remembering the man’s feelings that he’d rather have faced the Republic’s justice than Snoke’s control.

“The Supreme Leader is wise,” Kylo says.

“So very wise,” Rey spits out at him and he knows she’s remembering the way he’d felt in her mind. 

That is when he notices that she’s holding a quarterstaff. She is twisting it angrily in her hands, her mask blank over her face but he knows—knows—that her eyes are burning at him. He can practically see them.

He raises his eyebrows at it. “Where’d you get that?”

She looks down at it, then back up at him. Then she sinks into an attack stance and for a moment, he thinks that she’s going to actually be stupid and impulsive enough to attack him with a wooden quarterstaff when he has a fucking lightsaber. 

Then he remembers.

He smirks behind his mask.

“All right,” he says slowly. “But put that away. Unless you want me to cut it in half.” He pats the hilt of his lightsaber at his hip and Rey nods and leans the quarterstaff against the wall of the watering hole. Kylo sinks back into a crouch, holding up his hands defensively. “Well? Show me what you’ve got.”

She lunges and he blocks her incoming punch—and her incoming kick—before twisting her arm and throwing her back from him. Almost at once, she’s back, punching and kicking.

If ever he needed a reminder that Rey was not Kira, this would be it. Her fighting is wild—fierce, effective, but wild. She’s a dog fighting for scraps, not the lioness who hunts her pray. Kira is precise—almost to a fault. There is perfect control in her every movement, a well-trained weapon—first of the Jedi and then of the Ren. But Rey’s kicks and punches come from out of nowhere, and not because they’re controlled.

“You’ve got to learn to control yourself,” he tells her as he catches another one of them and sends her back again.

“Why, so that then you’d know what I’m doing next?”

“I seem to be doing that just fine like this,” he points out. 

That’s when her leg connects with his side—hard—knocking him back and winding him and a there’s her other foot, right in his chest, knocking him onto his back. 

“What were you saying?” From behind the mask’s voicebox, he thinks he hears the hint of a smile. 

He’s on the ground still, and her foot is on his chest and it feels a little bit like his heart might be exploding it’s beating so hard. Suddenly, he feels breathless and as he looks up at her, he notices the line that her leg makes as it connects to her hip, to her torso. She’s lithe—slim and strong and striking and it’s enough to make him pause without meaning to.

_Oh_.

He shakes himself and grabs her leg, tugging her down and a moment later he’s on his feet again and this time he is attacking—practiced forms that he’d drilled for however many years. It’s easy, the way he throws her over his knee and she’s on the ground again. It’s easy the way he sidesteps her next blow and places his foot just so so that she trips over it and he twists her arm up behind her back. “I don’t know,” he tells her. “What was I saying?”

She rips her arm away and whirls and her elbow finds his gut, winding him once again. He’ll have a bruise there, he’s sure. The thought almost makes him smile. _So much raw power, _he thinks. _She’ll come round. She has to come round. She needs a teacher._

“I don’t go down without a fight,” she tells him. “So whatever you think you’re proving to me, I—”

“I don’t think I’m proving anything,” he says. “Except to show you that there’s more I can teach you.”

“I’ve done just fine on my own,” she snaps.

“The point is you don’t have to be on your own,” he says. “The point is you don’t have to be alone. I know how much you hate it—being alone.”

“And you have no right to that knowledge,” she spits at him.

“Perhaps,” he replies. “But let me use what I have to help you. I don’t want to hurt you. I don’t want to be your enemy.”

She grabs the quarterstaff from the wall and goes into the watering hole without a word. _If that were Kira, she’d be pissed that I’m right, _he thinks. Or she’d be plotting his murder. He’s not wholly sure which.

She doesn’t speak all through their shared meal—which she orders far too much food during once again. “It’s not even _good_ food,” he complains, staring at the portions. “Why do you want it?”

“Good has nothing to do with it,” she replies evenly. 

Later, he should have taken that evenly as a warning sign. Rey is not even. Rey is jagged emotions—so many of them that they fire out of her in nearly every direction. Kira is even. And Rey, as he must keep reminding himself, is not Kira.

She leaves him with the bill and goes, presumably, back to the ship. She hasn’t gone far. He’s not such a fool that he won’t track her with the Force even when she’s out of his sight. 

He is putting his gloves on outside when the blast hits him, hard, in the side and his lightsaber is in his hand and he’s sunk into Soresu so quickly that he catches the next shot before it meets its mark. 

“Stand down,” he barks.

“Stand down? When Snoke sent you to destroy the evidence? Not a chance.” Kylo doesn’t even have time to be surprised that they’d found someone who spoke Basic to attack him before another blast comes his way. He parries it easily.

“What are you talking about?”

“He’ll use us until he’s through with us and then send his sentinel to destroy us?”

“I don’t know what you’re—”

Something hits him hard in the back of the head but through his helmet, it doesn’t hurt him, it just knocks him forward. 

He whirls and sends his lightsaber straight through the boy, because it is a boy. Barely more than ten or eleven if he had to guess, the same age as Ponyon who had been the first one who tried to stand up to him and die at the Praxeum that horrible night. Ponyon, and Grezl, and Evan, and Jacen. All had stood up to him, all children, their faces angry, and frightened and more than anything—small. 

Kylo’s heart is beating in his chest again, though for a different reason now, because he sees green as he retracts his saber and the boy falls to the ground, clearly dead. His saber is ripped from his hands and why isn’t he fighting? What’s going—

His helmet is pulled from his head and this time, when the blow connects with his head, it knocks him out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There are a few references to the comic that came out last month in this one! [This one](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/282261049636552704/621321251410935818/SPOILER_EELvXZKXkAEEkTt.png) most specifically.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I haven't gotten a chance to reply to reviews and I'm so sorry for that and am so grateful for all of them! It's been an intense week at work and I mostly just want to lie on the floor and stare at the ceiling forever which makes it hard to do most things. I hope you enjoy this chapter, and am so glad you're enjoying this fic!

**Kira**

She can’t really remember what it was like at her first few weeks at Luke’s Praxeum. There is this lurching blankness, the emptiness with knowing she’d been left behind, just like she’d feared. By the time she felt settled, by the time that memories of Ben sitting with her and letting her be quiet with him began to solidify, most of the others had taken for granted that she wanted nothing to do with them and hadn’t really bothered trying for friendship or companionship.

Kira hadn’t minded.

Relationships were transient, after all. Nothing lasted. Better not to form attachments that could hurt her. Keep your distance. Keep it professional.

Which was why it is endlessly jarring that the other pilots under Poe’s command all seem hell-bent on being her friend. They invite her to join them for meals, ask her about where she’d come from, what she wanted to do and be after they defeated the First Order.

Kira pretends to be overwhelmed by all the people. “There are more people in this mess hall than on all of Jakku,” she’d whispered to Finn, holding his hand the first day they’d been with the Resistance. He’d smiled and squeezed it. There was something nice about his smile. Rey was lucky to have it. _I won’t mess it up for her, _Kira thought. After all that loneliness, her sister deserved a nice smile, especially if she couldn’t get it from Kira. Kira didn’t really know how to smile in a way that felt real. She didn’t think her muscles moved like that anymore.

Except that Finn wasn’t actually Rey’s boyfriend. 

But one of the horrible things that Kira was starting to realize was that, just because Finn wasn’t Rey’s boyfriend, that didn’t make it less complicated. It made it _more_ complicated. Because now not only did she have to pretend to be Rey (as if that weren’t hard enough) and determine what Rey would believably want of her friends, but Finn seems _actually interested _in being Rey’s boyfriend. Which now she has no idea if Rey would even want. And does that even matter, because she’s got to kill Leia Organa—no matter how warm and regretful the General seems—and it’s not like Rey’s going to come back because Kira had promised her they’d be together at the end of all this. Which means she has to survive. Which means she has to make herself believable. Which means, which means, which means.

_Is this what Kylo’s head is like all the time? _she wonders. _It’s exhausting._

At least Kylo has it easier right now. He gets to go and kill Luke Skywalker the way he’s so desperately wanted for years and he doesn’t have to pretend to be his long-lost twin. He doesn’t have to worry about burgeoning feelings and—

She slams that thought out of her head as fast as she can.

She does _not_ have burgeoning feelings. She likes Finn’s smile is all. _He_ likes _Rey. _If she does _anything_, it’s going to be for Rey not her. She can’t afford feelings. Weapons don’t have feelings.

She spends her time memorizing the specs of each of the X-Wings. In the event that she has to make a fast getaway, better to work out what the ship’s weaknesses were. 

_And if there’s a homing beacon on it._

The thought is an errant one, and one that—given how much time she’d now spent on the ship

“Hey,” she calls to a passing tech. “Is there a way to check that my homing device works?”

“Hm?” The tech cocks her head. She’s short and stocky with thick dark hair and the same Haysian features as one of the bombers that Poe spends a good amount of his time talking to. 

“The ship’s homing device.”

“Is it busted?” the tech asks.

“How do I check?”

The tech comes over to where she’s standing, her hands on one of the control panels on the underside of the ship. “You won’t need to,” she says. “Your droid will.”

“Yeah, but—” and Kira swallows. What would Rey do here? “What happens if I get left behind?”

The tech’s face softens. “They won’t let that happen.” But she climbs up the ladder towards the cockpit anyway and Kira’s eyes land on her rear. She’s got wide hips under her brown jumpsuit and they sway a little bit from side to side as she climbs. Not in an intentional way, the way she’s seen the wide-hipped sway them to get the attention of those who want to get close. The movement is purposeful, precise, and Kira can’t stop staring.

“There’s a check in the cockpit,” the tech calls and now that she’s seated in the pilot’s seat, she peers her head over the edge of the ship. “Come on, I’ll show you.”

“Right,” Kira says and she climbs up too. 

The tech points to the control panel and presses a few buttons. “You’ll need a bioscan to access unless your droid is doing it. That’s probably why you couldn’t find it,” she says, pressing her palm to the screen. _Rose Tico _flashes across the panel quickly before fading into another layer.

“That’ll be it,” Kira says. “I’m not sure that I’ve set up a bioscreen.” She frowns. She doesn’t particularly want the Resistance to have her biological information in case something goes terribly, terribly wrong. For all she looks exactly like Rey, she can’t be sure that their genomes are identical. _There’ll have to be a way to get past that. _Right?

Recognition flashes across Rose’s face. “You’re Rey,” she says. “Paige mentioned you. You came with Finn. The First Order had you.”

Kira’s eyes snap to Rose’s. They’re shining with excitement, as though Kira—Rey—is something special. No one’s ever looked at her as though she’s special before—no one except Finn. 

_Oh no._

She swallows. 

_Don’t react. Don’t react. Don’t let yourself feel a thing._

“Yeah,” she says and her voice sounds oddly froglike. “Yeah, I’m Rey.”

“Rose,” Rose extends a hand and Kira shakes it. Her grip is form, and her hands are small. “It’s an honor to meet you. They said that Kylo Ren interrogated you.”

Kira swallows. “Yeah,” she replies quietly, hoping that’ll take Rose off the topic. “Yeah, he did.”

“It’s really brave of you to come out of that wanting to keep fighting. It’d make sense if you wanted to run away, hide from it all. But my sister says that’s the stuff that’s the making of a true hero.”

Her eyes keep shining at Kira. 

“Paige is your sister?” Kira asks slowly.

Rose’s face splits into a smile. “Yeah. She’s on the bomber squad. She’s my hero—has always been there for me.” Kira’s stomach churns. She wonders where Rey is now.

“That’s wonderful,” she says quietly.

“The First Order destroyed our planet,” and Kira pauses for the briefest moment, not long enough for Rose to register it because she keeps on talking, “but Paige and I—we keep fighting. I just wish I didn’t get vertigo the way she does or else I’d train to be a pilot too.”

“You’re helping. That’s important,” Kira says distantly. _The First Order destroyed our planet _rings in her ears in alternation with the s_he’s my hero _about her sister. 

“That’s what Paige says too. And I know it’s important. Doesn’t stop me from getting nervous whenever she flies out though. I want to have her back the way she has mine.”

“I can have her back for you,” Kira hears herself say. “No one should have to worry about their sister like that.” She has known Rose for five minutes, but already she knows it would break her heart if the First Order took her sister from her as well as her home. 

Anger floods her. _You serve them._

_I joined for _him_._

_Well, he serves them too._

_Why do you care? This girl is nothing to you._

But her spinning head stills when Rose smiles at her, wide and bright and Kira clings to it. _Kylo’s taking care of Rey—even if she hates him, even if she hates me. He wouldn’t hurt her. He wouldn’t._

“You’d do that?” Rose asks.

Kira nods, and tries to smile. It feels like trying to take care of Rey—doing something like that. She wants Rey to be happy. She’s always wanted Rey to be happy. She doesn’t want Rey to be alone the way she had to be on Jakku, without anyone to love her or care about her.

Finn wants to care about her. He wants to hold her hand, and keep her safe.

Rose stands up and suddenly her face is no longer at Kira’s eye-level but her hips are. She averts her gaze, and makes her way back down the ladder so that Rose can climb down too. 

“Thanks,” Rose says when they’re both on the ground again. She extends her hand again. “It means a lot. She’s all I have in the world.”

Kira nods and swallows. She doesn’t really know what her lips are doing right now. Smiling, she thinks. 

Rose’s gaze flickers. “Do you have a sister?” she asks as though she’s reading Kira’s mind, and Kira is too startled to lie.

“Yes,” she says at last. “I did. I do. I think. I—I don’t kn ow where she is.”

_Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, _stupid.

Rose’s face melts into a sympathetic expression and to Kira’s complete and utter shock, the smaller woman pulls her into a hug. “She’ll be ok. If she’s anything like you, she’s a fighter. A survivor.” Rose’s words are warm, her arms are warm, her breath against Kira’s neck is warm.

Kira takes a slow, shuddering breath. “Yeah—she is.”

**Finn**

He’s hardly had the chance to talk to Rey since the General had shepherded her away from him. He’ll give this to her: she’s _very _good at hiding. Because he’s tried and tried and tried to find her, but it’s not until several days later when he’s going into the mess hall for lunch that he catches sight of her at one of the tables. 

Finn squares his shoulders. They _are_ going to talk about this. They are. They aren’t just going to leave it hanging, he’s not going to let her think that he didn’t—that he _doesn’t_—want what she thought they’d had.

But as he approaches the table she’s sitting at, he realizes that she seems to have made a new friend. There’s a girl sitting across from her and her face positively lights up when she sees Finn.

“You’re Finn? _The_ Finn?”

Finn glances up at her. The girl is shorter than Rey and is standing there with a tray and an almost dreamy expression on her face.

“Yeah,” he replies. “That’s me. Finn. The—the Finn.” He glances around. He doesn’t like being known as _the_ Finn. He doesn’t want anyone to look at him like that. The second they look at him like that, the second they expect him to stick around and that’s the last thing he wants right now. And he just wants to talk to Rey right now. 

“It’s so brave, what you did,” the girl says as he sits down next to Rey. Rey shifts on the bench to make room for him, her side brushing against his. His heart beats a little faster. “Going back and sticking it to the First Order like that. After everything they put you through. You’re a real hero.” He swallows. And then she has to go and say something like that. _Quit it, you can’t stick up to Kylo Ren. The Knights of Ren could all destroy you. Plan A is a better plan. Plan A means you stay alive. _Plan A is the safer bet, especially because no matter what Poe had said, there’s _got_ to be a reason that the First Order hadn’t caught them as they were leaving D’Qar. There’s something that he’s missing. It’s not tactical for them to have just let the Resistance go.

“Yeah, I mean…” Finn glances at Rey. Sticking it to the First Order, as the girl had put it, had all been for Rey. But he can’t really say that can he? Especially not before he’s actually talked to Rey, before Rey knows that because she thinks it’s not like that for him. It’ll spook Rey and make this girl disappointed. Even if it only emphasizes to himself that Plan A is the plan to go with, and that those flashes of Plan B that invade his mind at the worst possible moments, visions of him throwing Phasma to the ground, of him putting a blast right through Kylo Ren’s helmet are a mild megalomania. He’s not a hero. He’s not brave. He did it to help Rey, not to save the galaxy from the First Order. Girls like this one shouldn’t look at him like that. “I guess.”

“And modest,” she grins. 

“He’s modest like that,” Rey says quietly and the look on her face makes Finn’s stomach do a thing. It’s warm and glowy and familial and something else that makes his mouth go a bit dry. Ok, so he hadn’t been expecting that. Does this mean that she’s kept on thinking about him? That maybe as she’s been hiding, she’s been healing the initial shock of it all and letting herself get used to the idea that he might want to be something to her? “Definitely a hero.” 

Well that’s certainly not helping with Plan A.

“We’re lucky to have you,” the girl says.

“What’s your name?” Finn asks her. He can’t keep calling her _the girl_ in his head, and the longer this goes on, the more likely that’ll happen. This isn’t the First Order where you can go around demanding someone’s identification number every four seconds because they, like everyone else, wears a mask. The Resistance actually expects you to know people’s names. People _have_ names, and not just numbers. They’re not just cogs in a machine. He likes that about this place. 

“Rose,” she says. “It’s great to meet you. An honor.”

“She works on the tech squad,” Rey says. “Helped me with a question about my ship.”

And some of Finn’s nervousness about all the words Rose is putting to his experience slips away. Rey had made a friend. Rey, who’s shy in big crowds and reaches out for his hand a lot—she’s made a friend. 

_That’ll make it harder to convince her to leave._

Because something tells him Rey isn’t like him. He likes Poe, he likes the others on the tactical squad they’ve assigned him to. He’d even maybe call them friends—Poe more than the rest because they’d gone through what they’d gone through together. But he’d leave them behind in a heartbeat if it meant he’d be safe.

Hell, a few days ago, he’d been willing to leave Rey behind in a heartbeat, find a ship that would take him to the outer rim where he could fade into nothingness. When had that changed?

Kylo Ren.

And there it is again.

Kylo Ren. Carrying her in his arms as he boards his shuttle and takes her away from him. And Finn had bent heaven and earth to find her, to rescue her. Because he’d known what the First Order was, would do to her, had done to her.

And now he’s back to wanting to run again, and somehow, he doesn’t think Rey will do that. Especially after all those years she’d spent waiting for parents who were never coming back. She’d been so upset on Takodana when he’d said he was leaving, he couldn’t fathom her wanting to do that to someone she cares about. 

“And of course, once we’ve regrouped, we’ll plan the next strike,” Rose is saying. “And we’ll keep on fighting until we’ve blasted them out of the stars.”

“Yeah, not like we have much choice,” Finn says and Rose’s gaze flicks to him, her eyes narrowing.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Something in her tone makes him sure she’d caught some of the frustration in his. 

“Just that we don’t have much of a choice, right?” he backpedals, but Rose’s eyes stay narrow. He watches her thinking and glances at Rey who is looking back and forth between them.

“You don’t want to fight.” Rose states at last. It’s not a question. It’s an observation, and Finn swallows, caught. She sounds angry, confused, hurt. Disappointed. “You’re—you don’t—?” 

He doesn't like that disappointment. “There’s no way we can win—not with the machine they’ve built,” he says quietly, trying to comfort her. If he can convince her, then that’s one more reason for Plan A. And if he can’t—

“We destroyed Starkiller—thanks to you,” Rose interrupts sharply, her eyes flashing in a way that makes his mouth go dry. “_You_ helped us destroy Starkiller base. Remember?” Distinctly. His breath is coming in a bit short and it takes him a second to realize that it’s her flashing eyes as much as her furious determination that’s making that happen. 

It’s disarming.

It’s distracting.

Especially with Rey sitting there right next to him.

And he has to scramble back to his own thoughts rather than replying because he can’t quite get over the way her eyes are shining.

“I meant the fighters. They’ve got millions more troopers than we do. They’ve got more ships, better guns.”

“Then why are you even here?,” Rose demands, those eye shining right into him, “Why didn’t you just run away?”

He looks at Rey but her expression is unfathomable. The upset she’d displayed on Takodana is gone. She’s just watching him closely. 

Rose takes advantage of the pause. “If we don’t fight for the end, then they’ll definitely win. Millions of people will die. Homeworlds will get destroyed, used up until they’re nothing anymore. I’d rather go down fighting and trying to save the good I know is out there than assuming it’s a lost cause already.”

“That’s because you don’t know what it’s like,” Finn retorts angrily. “You don’t know what it’s like to be in their army, to be commanded by their captains and generals. You don’t know what they look for in their leaders and why and—” He takes a deep breath. He can’t think about that now, all the men he’d stood beside, had trained beside and who will die, one way or another, because they’ve had no choice but to do what they’re doing. Some of them believe in it, some of them believe the lies they’re being fed. But some of them don’t.

They’re the body. A body, and there’s no way to just decapitate the First Order. There’s no standing up to Kylo Ren and his like, and no way to get to Snoke without doing just that. “You don’t know, you just think you do.”

Rose gets to her feet. “I’d rather not know and not give up than try and convince myself that I have reasons to be a coward.” She hurries off, slamming her tray onto the rack for cleaning and Finn watches her go.

“Sorry,” he mutters to Rey. “I didn’t mean to make your friend…” He heaves a sigh and then shoves himself back from the bench and grabs his tray. He knows Rey will follow him and she does. Her hand slips into his after they’ve put their trays away.

“It’s all right,” she says quietly. “You have your reasons. And they are justified.” He hates that she understands now, that she’s been made to understand. He wishes she could have just gone on in optimistic ignorance, that the beautiful lightness to her hadn’t been stamped out and send him right back to wanting to put his fist through Kylo Ren’s teeth.

He takes a deep breath. They’re alone again, for the first time since the General had interrupted them. He takes a deep breath, not really sure what he should say, what he _wants_ to say after all of that, but knowing he needs to say _something_.

And then before he even knows what’s happening, she’s biting her lip the way she does and stepping towards him and her lips are brushing against his and his brain sort of stops working for a second there because Rey’s kissing him. 

Her lips are so soft, and her breath is sort of flavorless like the food they’d just eaten, but she’s kissing him. No one’s ever kissed him before. No one’s wanted to. And Rey does. 

She pulls away. Her cheeks are a bit pink and a moment later she’s gone, hurrying after Rose.

Finn stands there for a long while.

Rey kissed him.

Rey kissed him and he liked it.

And they still haven’t _talked_.

**Kylo**

He wakes in a dark cell, his head throbbing, his lightsaber gone. The light on the planet is so low that it’s impossible to tell just how much time has passed. Has Rey—

He reaches out.

She’s still there.

The ship is still there.

And he can still use the Force.

They’ve bound his hands but he can still use the Force.

He laughs.

The bindings unwind themselves and he unlocks the door. He holds out a hand and summons his lightsaber—on the table in the next room and he ignites it.

The poor guard looks like he shat himself with fright when Kylo emerges, a snarl of amused rage on his face.

He thinks he’ll leave him alive. If only so he has to explain his own failures to whoever is in charge of him.

He strolls out of the excuse for a prison that they’ve left him in, knocking anyone who comes towards him out of his path with the Force.

He pauses when he reaches the portmaster. “Is it fully fueled?” he asks.

The man doesn’t understand him. Seems they found the only person who spoke basic to attack him, but didn’t keep him nearby.

It doesn’t matter.

Enough time will have passed. 

And Rey is on the ship.

The gangplank is sealed, but with a flick of his fingers, he finds the mechanism that lowers it back down and climbs it again, closing it behind him.

He moves lightly through the ship, finding Rey in the cockpit, feverishly bending over the ignition, trying to figure out the passcode, or a way to bypass the passcode. _So she was going to leave me. _Maybe it’s the head wound, but he’s finding all this highly amusing. And a little endearing. _Cutthroat, just like Kira. Determined to survive._

He can respect that. 

Unbidden, the memory of her towering over him when she’d thought she won crosses his mind. His mouth goes a little dry.

He leans against the computer port and turns it on and inputs his pass-key and the ship powers up. 

“Yes!” Rey hisses out in excitement. She must not have heard him. She certainly hadn’t known how to sense for him, but a moment later, she’s easing the ship into the air, up towards the stars above.

He waits until they’ve cleared the planet before asking, “So, did you tell them to attack me, or did you just see the opportunity to escape?”

**Rey**

Rey shrieks and jumps out of her chair, reaching for her quarterstaff, but Kylo sends it flying towards the back of the ship. He sits down in the seat next to her, peels off his gloves, plugs the next coordinates in, and kicks his feet up on the dashboard as the ship begins to turn. “There’s some bacta in the fresher. Can you grab it for me?”

“Why don’t you summon it?” she asks.

“Because I’m trying to see whether or not you’d do me a kindness.” He holds out a hand. “Apparently not.” The bacta container flies to it. She watches as he unclasps the belt holding his blacks in place, watches as he tugs his jacket off, his shirt up over his head and she’s seen his chest before, but she wasn’t expecting him to unfasten his pants and tug the waistline of them down a few inches so he can apply the bacta to where he had been shot. 

She swallows.

She’d seen his chest, but not his stomach and those muscles are rippling and the line of hair that trails from his belly button down to his—

“So what did you do? Hear them say they hoped Snoke wasn’t going to shut them down and hint that that might be what we were there to do?” He’s being very conversational about all this. It’s confusing. It’s disarming. 

Which is probably why she responds. 

“They thought that there might be more to our trip than just fuel. They said something about Snoke wanting to destroy the evidence and how they shouldn’t have trusted him to let them live.”

He’s still putting bacta on his wound, so she can’t see his face.

“And so you implied that they might be right. You took one look at the backwater locals and thought that you’d be able to take advantage of them?”

“That’s not what I did,” Rey flares at once. Except that it was exactly what she did. She glares at him. 

“It doesn’t matter,” he says. “All’s said and done, and we’re never going to hear from them again. So what say you and I make our peace, shall we?”

“I won’t make peace with you,” she glares at him. “You’re a monster.”

“I did treat you monstrously,” he agrees and all of that bemusement is gone now. His eyes are locked on her, his gaze so intense it makes her throat dry out. “And I’m sorry. Please understand that the First Order is at war with the Resistance, and I did what I had to do to help my master win his war.”

“You did what you had to do?” She wants it to be a snarl, a cutting comment, but her throat is too dry, and she has to swallow and it undercuts the effect. “And you’re now trying to get me to forgive you, is that it? Is that what you’d say to your uncle if he tried to convince you that he—”

His head snaps up and his eyes are filled with rage. “The two situations are different,” he shouts at her. “How dare you compare—”

“Oh? How are they different? _You_ were the one who pointed out he went into your mind!”

“I was his nephew! He wasn’t at war with me the way that I—”

“No, you just went and joined his enemy the second he—”

And he’s bursting to his feet now, his hands extended and his lightsaber igniting in her face. It’s the closest she’s ever been to the blade. It’s bright and red, but oddly, it isn’t hot at all. She glares up at him. 

“Go on then,” she growls. “End it. It’ll be good practice for when you find Skywalker.”

The blade vanishes and he looks down at her. This is the anger she’d expected when he’d first boarded the ship, this is what she’d thought would happen.

He takes a slow, steadying breath and turns away from her towards the back of the ship and the bunks. “In any event,” he says. “I apologize.” She’s staring at his bare back, muscled and scarred. He takes another breath, his whole frame expanding and retracting. “I know what it is to be violated in that way. And I am sorry to have done it to you.”

And then he’s gone. 

It’s not the first time that Rey wishes there were a little more privacy on the ship. She can either stay in the cockpit and stare at the stars streaming past her until she loses her mind again, or she has to go and climb onto the bunk underneath him.

She sits there for a long time, examining her hands because she can’t look out the viewports. _He kidnapped me, _she thinks angrily. _He kidnapped me, and invaded my mind, and brought me to his master who invaded my mind again. And he wants me to forgive him?_

But guilt picks at her. Somehow, she feels as though she crossed a line and—far from feeling victory in that—she feels guilty. She hurt him in saying that—what other explanation could there be for him going from almost pleasantly talking about how she’d sold him out to the clones at that port to igniting his lightsaber in her face? And no matter how much she tells him that he’s a monster, somehow her heart is telling her that right now, that isn’t true. His uncle had tried to murder him, and it hurts. She knows what it’s like—to feel an uncontrollable pain about family.

_A nerve to know exists, _the part of her that had had to fend for herself for years in the Jakku desert whispers. _A wound you can twist a knife in if you must. _

Why hadn’t he been angry with her when he’d—

But of course. The answer is in her hands, or rather on her hands—the gloves that had belonged to Kira. 

And burning curiosity takes over. 

She gets to her feet and moves to the back of the ship and asks, quietly, but knowing he’ll hear her, “What made Kira believe you?”

He is lying on his bunk, staring up at the ceiling overhead. 

“Believe me when?”

“When you said Luke was trying to murder you. When you told her. Why did she believe you? You said she did. She didn’t even believe I was her sister at first—why would she believe that?”

Kylo doesn’t look at her. He stares at the ceiling, his breathing steady, his chest rising and falling. It’s still bare. The bacta patch that’s clinging to his side has not been touched since he put it on. 

“The situations are different,” he says at last, and he turns to look at her at last, and his voice sounds oddly dead. Emotionless. _He doesn’t want to talk about this, _Rey realizes. It’s hurting him to think about it.

But he soldiers on. “Kira—well, she’s too smart for her own good. She’s calculating. And the first thing she does—anywhere she goes—is make sure she’s safe. My guess,” and he holds up a hand, almost defensively, and when he continues, there’s a little more animation to his voice. “My _guess_ is that she made herself forget you. Because I remember what she was like when she first was brought to the Praxeum. I remember how angry she was, how she couldn’t stop crying, but wouldn’t let anyone see her crying. She was just this scrap of a kid, and she was hurting and left behind by her parents and—” his eyes lock with hers, “and she kept saying that she knew it was only a matter of time before it happened to her too.”

Rey’s mouth is dry, and there’s a stinging pain in her temple. Somewhere, far away, she hears crying—a little girl’s tears. Hers? Or Kira’s?

“She stopped after a while. She meditated a lot, or locked it down in her heart, I don’t know. People do—” he lets out a bitter laugh, “People do strange things to cope.”

“Like turning to the dark side?” Rey asks sharply.

“That wasn’t coping,” Kylo says, his voice black with anger again. “That was freedom.” He sits up, and winces. “And she knew that. She knew that no home was safe, no place is safe —if _Luke Skywalker_ tries to murder his own nephew, what sort of place was his praxeum? Was it better than the parents who left her behind? Especially when I was the one who helped her through her parents leaving her behind?”

“You were—”

“As if mine didn’t abandon me to Luke,” he snarls. “Too much darkness in me, so what’s the point in trying to love their son anymore.”

Rey hears herself gasp as though it’s from far away. 

“That’s not the truth,” she hears herself say.

“Oh, you think just because my father gave you a blaster that he wouldn’t leave me behind? My father spent his entire _life_ avoiding responsibility.”

“He loved you,” she says. There are tears in her eyes, tears in her throat. Han Solo had never once mentioned a son, but she knows, she knows down in her heart—he wouldn’t—he wasn’t like her father. He _isn’t_.

“So afraid to face the truth,” he tells her and she could scream at him for the arrogance in his tone. “I was like that, once. Afraid to say they didn’t love me. Afraid to admit that my uncle feared me. I’m not afraid of it anymore.”

“No, you’re afraid to think that maybe you were wrong,” she yells at him.

“I wasn’t.” His voice is so quiet now, that a shiver runs down her spine. “You’ll see when we get to Luke. I wasn’t wrong.”

He turns away from her, lies back against the bunk, looks up at the ceiling. “Anyway, that’s why Kira believed me. She wasn’t afraid to look the truth in the face the way you are.”

“I’m not afraid of anything,” Rey snaps at him.

“Kira’s still a better liar than you, for all you look exactly like her,” he says. “Know what you’re afraid of. Turn it into a weapon. That will make you strong.”

Rey stands there for a long while, staring at him.

“No it won’t,” she says at last. “That’s not strength.”

His head snaps sideways to look at her again. “Oh?”

“It still controls you,” she says. “That’s not turning it into a weapon—unless it’s a weapon you use against yourself. If it didn’t control you, you wouldn’t have lit your lightsaber.”

He glares at her now. “Remember this next time you think about your parents selling you off for drinking money—keeping your sister but abandoning you.”

“Shut _up!_” Rey yells and she doesn’t mean to do it. She doesn’t even know what _it_ is—except that it must be using the Force—because a moment later he’s hitting the wall a few inches away from where he’s lying. Not a long throw by any stretch of the imagination, but still—she’d shoved him without touching him.

“You need a teacher,” he says softly.

“Yeah, and I don’t think you’d make a very good one, so no thanks,” she snaps at him.

“Suit yourself,” he says. She watches him settle back down on the bunk, a small smirk curling at his lips. “But you just turned your fear into a weapon.”

**Kylo**

He can’t stop thinking about it—the little clone boy he killed.

He remembers the way he’d just gone limp the same way the others had when he’d killed them that night too. Life gone. Force gone. Breath gone. Body limp.

He’d forgotten it for a moment, a brief almost enjoyable moment when he’d managed to surprise Rey. And then she’d gone and reminded him about his uncle, questioning him about that night, and Kira, and all the lies his life had once been built upon, and now when he closed his eye, all he could see were the children he had killed.

_You’re a monster, _Rey reminded him constantly. 

_Yes I am._

He deserved nothing better than Snoke’s teachings. He should revel in his darkness. It should make him powerful, like his grandfather. 

Darth Vader had killed children too, after all—right before he’d left the Jedi Order forever.

Had his grandfather been so shaken by it? Had it made it hard for him to sleep at night too, remembering the brave faces that the young ones had faced him with as they prepared to die?

The bacta does its work and by the next day, the blaster wound in his side is little more than a memory. Which is good, because he has to concentrate.

The trouble with the Unknown Regions is just that: they are unknown. And he’s a good pilot—one of the best in the galaxy, and he doesn’t even begin to think he’s arrogant for saying so—but the further out they go—without a map—the less inclined he is to take long hops through hyperspace. _You should have gotten the droid, _he can practically hear Hux saying. _Then you’d have a complete charted map, and not the shade of a memory that Snoke ripped from the girl._

_Yeah, and you invested how many of our resources into a waste of a military project? Fuck off._

“Sir,” comes a voice over the transmitter, and Kylo turns it on. There’s a hologram of a helmeted Veesh Ren. 

“What?” he asks.

Veesh doesn’t reply right away. Kylo glares at the holograph. Is it frozen? Then,

“Where’s your mask?”

“My—” Kylo looks around. That lowlife on that planet had tugged it off his head, but he hadn’t thought to look for it when he’d broken himself out of their pitiful excuse for a prison. “Doesn’t matter,” he says, more than a little edgily. He doesn’t like his knights seeing his face. It was Vader’s mask that made him feared. He was more than just a man in that mask. Without his helmet, Kylo Ren looks suspiciously like Ben Solo, with the long face and too-large ears and nose. He looks like his parents, not his grandfather. “What is it?”

“Have you had any communications from Kira Ren?” Veesh asks him carefully.

“No,” he replies. “Or do you forget that I put you in charge while we were both on our missions?”

“I ask simply because it’s been several days since her last transmission,” Veesh says. “I hope that nothing’s happened to her.”

Kylo swallows. If for some reason she’d been caught…but no, they wouldn’t kill her. Imprison her, perhaps. Find some way to lock her in a cell, suppress her Force powers—but they wouldn’t torture or kill her. Not unless his mother had changed personalities. _Good people are so delightfully easy to manipulate, _Snoke enjoyed saying. _There are necessary lines they refuse to cross. _

“If she hasn’t been in touch, it will be because she’s deemed it necessary,” Kylo says.

“You don’t think—” Veesh begins, but cuts himself off.

“What?”

“Well—this is the first time she’s ever been on a solo mission. You don’t think it’s possible they might have swayed her to their cause?”

Maybe it’s because he’d phrased it as a _solo_ mission, but Ben growls, “Kira’s the most steadfast of my knights and I trust her more than I trust you. If she hasn’t been in touch, it’s because she has elected not to be in touch.”

“Forgive me,” Veesh says at once. “I didn’t mean to imply—”

“Yes you did,” Kylo replies. “And don’t pretend, it’s unbecoming. You’re not as good a liar as she is.”

“If she’s such a good liar, how can you be sure she hasn’t lied to you?”

Kylo ends the call, glaring at the spot that the holo had stood just moments before.

“Fuck off, Veesh,” he snaps.

Maybe he shouldn’t have left him in charge. _He’s Snoke’s favorite of them, _Kylo reminds himself. And especially after letting the droid go, he needed to do something that Snoke would think was the right choice. But still, Kira wouldn’t just abandon his side like that after—what—a week on task? She’s too cold and calculating to be won over with some sob story about oppression. She doesn’t have his mother’s bleeding heart, and she doesn’t have Rey’s flaring temper. 

She’ll stay on target to the bitter end.

“Fuck off,” he repeats at Veesh, though the call is long ended. 

He gets to his feet, deciding that he’s going to do some exercises and he catches Rey watching him from halfway down the walkway. She pretends not to be watching him at once, but she’s flushing, clearly embarrassed at being caught at a key-hole. 

There isn’t enough room in this ship, but there’s really not enough room in this ship when brushing past the person in the hallway to get to the bunks means you brush against her chest and gooseprickles erupt all over your skin and your heart leaps up into your throat.

_Get a grip, _he growls at himself. If he just hadn’t noticed her like that when they’d been sparring. She’s Kira’s sister. She looks _exactly _like Kira, and he can’t for the life of him imagine feeling like this about Kira. The mere thought of it is repulsive. She and Rey have the same face, the same body—

Except their eyes look at him differently, and Rey goes for the jugular and somehow that excites him more than it should.

He strips off his jacket and begins to stretch. He does push ups and sit ups and jumping jacks and planks and every exercise he’s ever learned that’s run on his own body weight. When he’s tired himself out, he heads towards the shower and finds Rey sitting in the hallway, her eyes closed, her hands resting on her knees and she’s—

Meditating?

He brushes against her Force signature as lightly as he can. 

No, she’s not meditating. She doesn’t know how to meditate, doesn’t know how to let her thoughts go, let them return like waves, and then let them go again.

This is something else. 

He goes into the Fresher and strips out of his sweaty clothes, turning on the water and stepping under the spray. All of his senses are trained on Rey on the other side of that door. What is she doing? 

He realizes that she’s trying to lift her gloves with the Force half a second before she does it and he slams his Force signature down hard on hers, a body-check of sorts.

He hears her yell in surprise and he turns off the water, grabbing a towel and wrapping it around his waist as he hears her shout, “_I don’t need a teacher!_”

“Maybe not,” he calls back, grabbing a cleaner pair of clothes, “But if you try that, you’re going to destroy this ship and then we’ll both be dead and what’ll you have then?”

“I don’t want your help.”

“Well, too bad, you’re getting it. I don’t have a death wish.”

“Could have fooled me,” Rey growls as the door to the fresher opens. Her cheeks are flushed with frustration, and the way her eyes are narrowed at him in frustration right now makes his stomach do…something. It does something.

He stares at her. 

What had he been about to say?

He can’t remember. All he can think is that that flush brings a nice color to her cheeks. She’s paler, now that she’s been out of the sunshine for a while. Her skin tone is getting closer and closer to Kira’s, but that flush is making her seem rosy and—

“You got a problem?” Rey demands, her hands on her hips.

“I—what?—I—” Kylo stammers. Then he collects himself. “Don’t do that.”

“And why not?”

“Do you want to die?”

“You think just because I don’t know what I’m doing that I’m just going to blow everything up?” she snaps. “I can stop myself before it gets bad, you know.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Well—” Kylo scrambles. Why is he flustered? He doesn’t get flustered in arguments like this but he feels like he’s twelve again all of a sudden—unable to think of anything better than, “Well, I’m the captain of this ship and I say—”

“Oh,” Rey says, holding up both of her hands. “The _captain!_ Forgive me, I didn’t realize I was in the presence of royalty.”

“I’m not royalty,” Kylo snaps and immediately remembers that he is, in fact, royalty.

“Well, could have fooled me,” she replies, “What with your graceful demeanor and austerity and your need that everyone do exactly as you say and obey your every whim.”

“I do not—” he begins but cuts himself off. This is stupid and pointless and why is his heart beating this quickly. Her eyes are flashing and it’s distracting him.

So he does what the son of Han Solo would only ever do in this situation:

He flees.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all so much for your reviews last chapter. I'm still a huge fucking mess and haven't gotten to replies yet but I wanted to say thank you thank you thank you <3

**Rey**

It takes Rey another four hours to realize he’s avoiding her.

The most frustrating part of being on this ship with him is how impossible it is to actually have a moment of privacy. There is no avoiding. And for Rey, who had spent her life in isolation, it’s more than a little hellish. There’s a difference between aloneness and loneliness, and while Rey—he’s _wrong_ she _can_ face the truth—will admit to loneliness, and frequently, she’s never had any trouble with being _alone_. It’s her natural state. She is comfortable with having no one around her for miles. Finn had been the first person she’d ever not been alone with, and she’s not even sure she could say she’d gotten used to that before he’d left her for the Outer Rim and all this had happened.

But after his little _I’m the Captain_ moment, she honestly thinks he’s avoiding her. 

It rankles. More than she wants it to. By miles.

How dare he try to avoid _her_. For _this_. Not her trying to leave him behind on that planet, no, or even when she’d made him lose his temper about his uncle. But because she wanted to use the Force on this ship, wanted to teach herself but didn’t want a teacher.

If he’s going to be that petty—well—

She sits down on the floor in the walkway again, takes off her gloves and settles them on the floor in front of her, and closes her eyes. Where had she been? Oh yes.

She’d been trying very hard to isolate that motion in her body that wasn’t _of_ her body, the way that it felt to feel without feeling, to throw him through the air by her own will and not with her fists. Something bigger than her, but so small that she could feel it in her skin, in her lungs. She breathes—in and out. Everything is still. But if she can make her gloves move—just an inch.

And then she feels everything stop, feels as though she’s been tackled without being tackled.

“I meant it,” he growls from the cockpit. “Not on this ship unless you want me to actually teach you.”

“I’m just moving my gloves,” she snaps.

“And how do you know you’re not going to blow up the ignition line?”

“Because unlike you, I probably actually know where the ignition line is,” she snarls. “Do you?”

“I do, actually,” he snarls right back. “Do you really think that I didn’t help my father fix that junk heap of a ship he loved more than me? Do you really think a good pilot doesn’t know where the fucking ignition line on their ship is?”

“But I suppose I can’t, because I’m just a scavenger sand rat.”

“Or maybe you’ve never been trained in the Force and don’t have the control you think you have yet. It’s not like fighting. It’s not only what you can see in front of you and make your body do.”

“Well, I won’t know until I try.”

“And you won’t try on my ship unless you’re letting me train you.” Then, she hears him mutter to himself, “I’ve never met anyone in my life who has such a fucking death wish.”

“I do _not_ have a death wish,” Rey practically roars, surging to her feet and following him into the cockpit.

He looks up at her, and the frustration in his face fades. Those annoying big brown eyes of his go softer the longer he stares at her.

“No,” he agrees at last. “No, you’re possibly one of the most resilient people I’ve ever met. What else could thrive in the Jakku desert?”

Rey doesn’t know what to say to that. He keeps blowing hot and cold and it keeps unfooting her and she doesn’t like it at all. 

“You’re impossible, you know that?” She doesn’t mean to say it, she just sort of blurts it out. And his face changes once again, a shadow crossing it, his eyes turning to steel. 

“Yes, I am.”

Rey stares at him and he stares back.

She feels as though somehow she managed to lay a blow she doesn’t understand. It’s even more unsettling than the hot and cold. 

_I wish he still wore his mask. It would be easier to think him a monster, _she thinks quietly as a guilt she doesn’t understand fills her. 

He has such expressive eyes.

**Kira**

Kira sees him in the training bay, correcting the grip of one of the Resistance members. 

“You’re holding it wrong,” she hears from across the way. “You’re going to strain your wrist if you do it like this.”

_FN-2187. We’re going to fast track him, _Hux had said sounding very bored. _He’s showing all the qualities we’d want in a captain._

_Yeah, _Kira thinks. _He is._

She doesn’t know exactly when he’d started joining in the training regimens. Maybe the day before, maybe earlier in the week. She knows he’d been observing them, but now he’s showing the little squadron what Stormtrooper shooting form is, and has thrown himself into the training quite as much as—

Well, he’s a traitor.

But as she watches him, she can differentiate him from the other soldiers. When he talks, it’s with confidence. When he contradicts, it’s not with fear of retribution. And he looks like he’s fitting right in, even without a uniform, even without a formal recognition of recruitment. Because he hasn’t signed up officially.

He’s good, as he runs, plants his feet, fires his simulator, then runs again. His form is precise, his body striking, muscular.

Which is when she turns away from him. _He’s for Rey, not you, _she berates herself. _You’re watching his training with professional detachment. _

And she’s certainly not thinking about how warm his lips had felt against hers when she’d kissed him. 

What can a stormtrooper do when he’s not a stormtrooper? Finn, it seems, can do a lot. He has progressed so much since the last time she observed his training. He’d been standout then, but standing out as a Stormtrooper didn’t actually mean very much because Stormtroopers were punished when they took too much liberties. Not so here. Not even remotely so.

_The tests were right. He does have leadership potential._

More than potential.

She wonders if he knows that.

She feels a tap on her shoulder and turns to face Poe. “He’s doing good,” Poe says, nodding to Finn.

“Yeah,” Kira agrees.

“Think he’s settling?”

“Couldn’t tell you,” she replies.

Poe gives her an odd look. “You settling?” he asks her.

Kira swallows. “I suppose,” she replies. “Not used to being around this many people, you know?”

“Yeah, that’ll be hard to get used to,” Poe says, clearly attempting to understand what Rey’s isolation on Jakku might have meant to her. _As if I really know. _It’s not a comforting thought. “Let’s get you somewhere you are used to,” he says and she nods and follows him to the flight simulators. 

“All right,” he says settling into his command station. “No funny business this time,” he commands.

Snap burps in response, and Jessika laughs and Oddy says, “You got it boss,” and Kira can’t help but smile.

For all Poe calls this training, it’s not like any training she’s ever known. Training and laughter don’t exist at the same time. Training is serious, training is to be taken seriously, not—

“Hey, Red Five. Something in your engine or what?” Oddy asks.

“Right, sorry,” she says and she turns on her simulator.

“Let’s see what Jakku’s got for us today,” Jessika’s voice drifts in through the communicator and Kira can _hear_ the smile in her voice. They’re all just…friendly. 

It’s strange.

There had never been friendliness with the other knights. Veesh had been passive aggressive, Ydram-Pu had been emotionless, and Griotaru had been unnecessarily aggressive. _If_ she joked, she joked with Kylo, but his sense of humor had taken quite a turn after his uncle had tried to murder him. So had hers. Training was serious and to be taken seriously, not a time for—

“How much you want to bet I can nail fifty targets?” Snap asks.

“The real question is can you nail fifty before I do?” Poe replies.

And Kira smiles.

They think she’s just some kid from Jakku.

She can be precise. She can show them how it’s done. She is the weapon, honed beyond what they can even fathom.

One right after the other, targets fall before her gunning. Finn’s right about how they train—they’re not precise. And while she actually thinks, tactically, that has its advantage—chaos can lead to self-destruction, after all—she’s a Knight of Ren, and the Force guides her every moment.

“Look at you, Jakku!” Jess laughs when she hits fifty first. “They got good sims in that backwater?”

“No,” Kira says before smiling. “That was all me.”

“Look at who’s cocky in her cockpit,” Snap teases at her, in an almost sing-song that sends her right back to being ten at the Praxeum and Ben telling her that she’s too big for her britches sometimes, just to get a rise out of her.

“I beat you to fifty, didn’t I? I’ll beat you to a hundred too.”

She’s laughing and smiling and when they’re done with the simulator going to the mess hall, she’s keeping in line with them all. She feels lighter than she has in a long while. 

She eats with gusto, and Finn joins them from the infantry training and there’s a spark in his eye that makes his face just shine. He keeps looking at her, and she knows—just _knows_ he’s going to try talking to her again and Kira thinks fast and slides her hand in his. He looks down at her, then gives her a tentative smile. She gives him one back.

It's enough. He knows what she thought the last time she held his hand. She’s kissed him. She’d not avoiding him anymore. She can let him connect the dots, so that he doesn’t even begin to connect any of the other, more dangerous dots.

For a moment, Kira wonders what would happen if they just—let go of it all. If _she_ just let go of it all. If she told Finn the truth, and they stayed with the Resistance. She’d rather fight at Finn’s side than at Veesh’s. They could figure out a way to rescue Rey—for real this time—once she got back from her mission with Kylo…

Except she can’t leave Kylo behind. She _won’t_ leave Kylo behind. So long as Kylo’s with the First Order, then so is she. That’s why she’s there, after all isn’t it? Because she’d seen his face that night and had known the truth, and had chosen him over Luke, over the light, had let herself become one of Snoke’s weapons in? She had never cared for politics, and freedom, and whatever it was that made Poe sit up straighter. She just wanted to stay alive, stay with her family. And Kylo will never be here. He won’t join his mother’s ragged band of idealists. Not after everything.

Even if his mother isn’t what he had always thought, even if she seems to care.

But mothers aren’t to be trusted.

Luke’s lightsaber weighs at her hips and she shoves her food into her mouth.

She has a job to do. 

Now is not the time to get sentimental.

**Rey**</>

Rey doesn’t try to do anything active with the Force again, but that doesn’t mean she’s not paying attention to it.

Rey has always been good at waiting. Very good. And so while she waits she examines. Because now that she knows it’s there inside her, she can at least understand the contours of it. No risk of blowing up the ignition line or whatever stupid excuse Kylo comes up with to keep her from doing anything if she’s just examining herself.

It flows through her like a second pulse now that she knows it’s there. A bright, cool light that bubbles beneath her skin, beneath her blood, through her sinew, filling her bones alongside her marrow. It keeps her strong though she hasn’t walked in the sands in days, it keeps her…

She doesn’t know how to describe it.

Feelings are hard to describe, and the Force is harder than feelings.

It’s her breath coming in and out of her body, it’s the stars all around her. 

It’s Kylo, lurking just on the periphery of her awareness.

Because once she starts sensing it in herself, she notices it in him and oh—oh how she notices it in him.

He seems to burn mere feet away from her, bursting with a power so intense that she wonders that he can contain it. It’s blinding except she cannot see it. It’s numbing except it is not cold. And there, at the core of it—

“What are you doing?” he asks her.

“I’m not doing anything,” she lies, knowing he’ll respond with _Kira is a better liar _the way he always seems to.

But he doesn’t. He just snorts. “What are you sensing?”

Rey narrows her eyes and turns her head to him. 

“Is this some sort of trick where you teach me without my wanting to?”

“It’s boredom, really. We aren’t going to make our next planetfall for another four hours.”

“You’re lying,” Rey says, because somehow she can sense that through the Force, the way his flares and recedes. Somehow, she knows it’s hiding a lie.

“Fine,” he agrees. “Call it curiosity, then. How do I look to you now that you’re teaching yourself to see?”

Rey closes her eyes. She doesn’t have to look at him to feel him, and as she traces the edges of his Force she recognizes something that makes her heart twist.

“You don’t want to be this,” she whispers. “You want to be more.”

_You’re afraid you will never be as strong as Darth Vader, _she’d said to him when she’d pushed into his head. But this didn’t feel like that. There was a disconnect between what she’d seen and what she’s feeling now—one she doesn’t understand.

_I’m sorry. In any event, I apologize._

She opens her eyes and turns her head to look at him. He’s watching her, his face guarded. 

“You don’t want to be Darth Vader, do you?” she asks him sharply. “You keep telling yourself that because you think it’ll make you safe and you want to be safe. Your uncle tried to kill you and you forced yourself into a direction you didn’t want, is that it?”

“I killed my peers,” he replies evenly. “I killed every one of Luke’s students save for Kira. There is a darkness in me, and I am Vader’s heir.”

“No,” Rey retorts. “I don’t think you are.” And then she cocks her head, and smiles sadly to herself. “Kira’s a better liar than you.”

He doesn’t say another word to her until they make planetfall, but Rey’s alright with that. She’s reeling from her own words. She had just known what the truth was. And even if he tried to point out the flaws in the logic, that he _had_ killed Luke’s students, somehow they didn’t destroy the larger truth that she could see in him. Complicate it, perhaps. But not destroy completely. And she had no idea how, or why.

She’d met Plutt’s goons who had done so much less than Kylo Ren, and yet she was far more convinced that they were cruel and mean than he was.

She remembers him drawing his lightsaber on her in his rage when she’d suggested that what he’d done to her was what Luke had done to him.

He’s a violent murderer, soldier for the darkness who had hurt her for the larger purpose. And there is a self-loathing beneath all of that that fuels him. _I am no better than this._

That was different than choosing to work for Plutt because it gave you a justification to have power. Even in the extreme conditions of Jakku, there were other ways to survive, and yet they’d wanted people to fear them.

For all his posturing, she doesn’t think Kylo Ren wants people to fear him.

Or at least, he didn’t want _her_ to fear him.

She finds herself pitying him, somehow. But not the sort of pity she would have thought three days, pitying him for lack of moral integrity, for lack of honor, for lack of kindness or compassion. The confusing part of it all is that she thinks he might have all that, but was driven to this.

_He’s a murderer, _she berates herself. _He’s a monster. Even he says he’s a monster._

_If he’s a monster, then so is Kira._

Rey swallows and looks down at her hands.

Kira.

Always Kira.

Kira, the one who had picked him over Luke Skywalker, the one who had chosen life in darkness rather than a defiant death, the one who her parents had chosen to keep for a little while longer. 

She doesn’t want Kira to be a monster. No matter what she had told her back when she’d been strapped to that thing on that First Order base—she wanted her sister, wants her sister. _Even if she’s a monster too?_

She’s confused. 

Except she’s also not.

Kylo Ren was a monster, a self-avowed murderer. And she might think the road that brought him to that was unfair, was understandable, but that didn’t mean she was going to side with murderers—not when Finn was out there.

If Kylo Ren didn’t want to be a monster, if he felt he was no better than this, it was on _him_ to change himself. Rey could not help him.

She could only wait. Wait and see if maybe the pain she saw in him was the shadow of some goodness he wished to recover, and not a poison she’d drink down and take within her until she couldn’t recognize herself and couldn’t free herself from.

And luckily, she was good at waiting.

They make planetfall an hour later, and this planet reminds her of Jakku.

It is dry, and bright, and hot, and the people at the port they land in seem worn thin. They watch as Rey and Kylo approach the portmaster, as they negotiate a refueling, Kylo doing his best to be intimidating and dangerous when he doesn’t have his mask anymore. Is Rey imagining it, or do they all seem a little less afraid of him because of it? His eyes burn with promised threats and it’s enough to get the fuel lines hooked into the ship, but there isn’t a rush to complete the task.

Something’s off. 

Rey doesn’t know what it is, just that it’s there, prickling at the corners of her awareness. 

“Food?” Kylo proposes quietly and Rey almost jumps out of her skin. She’d thought he still wasn’t talking to her.

“Yes,” she says, and he nods and the two of them leave the port, weaving their way through narrow alleys in this outcropping of life. The prickling feeling doesn’t go away, and Rey’s eyes dart around, taking in everything she can. The windows are mostly curtained to keep the heat out, the doors are reinforced and thermo-enhanced. She doesn’t see eyes anywhere. The alleyway is empty.

So why does she feel as though they’re being watched?

Kylo grabs her arm and tugs her behind him, his lightsaber igniting in his hand right as a blast fire comes down from a roof. He swings the saber almost lazily, sending the blaster fire back at the shooter. Rey doesn’t even have a blaster, she can’t help in any way.

“Stay back,” Kylo barks at her as though he’d read her intention without even looking at her, as though he’d felt it—

She reaches out towards the edge of her consciousness, feels him there.

“_Stop that_,” he growls and she does, the echoes of his emotions ringing through her. _You’ll distract me. Do you want us both to die? Are you trying to get me killed?_

It’s that split-second that’s enough.

A blast hits him in the shoulder and he drops his saber and someone, darts out of a door that must have cracked open while Rey’s attention had been elsewhere. The person kicks the saber hard, and another one grabs it from the dust as two more assailants jump down from the roofs and begin fighting.

He’s a brawler—using every inch of himself to fight off the attackers who are swirling around him like flies. He punches and kicks and blocks and trips and falls and they’re surrounding him, kicking him and Rey’s standing there, rooted to the spot, forgotten by everyone because she hadn’t started fighting at all.

Then a blaster is pointed in her face, and some life form in a mask says something in a language she doesn’t understand.

“I don’t know what you’re—” she begins, and the creature changes his language.

“He killed the last son,” he says. “For that, Blaimas will have his head.”

Rey has _no_ idea what this means.

Something jabs her through the Force, pain, confusion, and she feels consciousness leave him. They keep kicking him, his blood mixing into the sand.

Rey doesn’t move, but out of the corner of her eye, she sees his lightsaber.

She’s never used a lightsaber.

And he hadn’t even let her move her gloves with the Force.

But it’s time to stop waiting.

She closes her eyes, pretending to be unable to watch the way they keep on kicking him and this time, she reaches not for him, but for the cold hard metal that’s now hanging limply in one of the attacker’s hands as he watches.

And then it’s not in the attacker’s hand.

It’s in hers.

She ignites it and with a swipe, cuts the blaster that’s being pointed at her in two before ramming the man through with one of the crossguards.

Crossguards.

She’d never had crossguards before.

She’s fought with her staff, but this isn’t her staff.

Well—no time like the present to see how much of that is transferrable.

On Jakku, the Teedos had called her hellcat. She’d been a brawler, just like Kylo. Fight for survival because if you show weakness in the face of their strength, then nothing and no one will be able to get the best of you, bend you to their will, destroy you more utterly than your parents did. 

But Rey can’t be wild here. She has to be controlled. The wind is hot against her face as she swipes the lightsaber at the closest thug, slicing at his hand. He yells, the wound she’d cut there cauterizing from the heat of the saber, but his blaster is in the sand. Rey slashes it in half and kicks him in the stomach, sending her elbow into another fighter who has turned their attention from Kylo to Rey. She winds them, and kicks them hard and sends her—his—lightsaber into the shoulder of another, who cries out and stumbles back.

She’s used to her body knowing what to do when she fights. She’s had to fight too much, has trained with her quarterstaff enough that she is used to her muscles remaining calm while her heart lurches. But that it knows what to do, somehow, with this lightsaber, even though she’s never touched one before in her life…

Her instincts have always been good. She’s always had a split-second of a sense of what’s coming before it happens. She wonders now if that’s the Force guiding her, if the Force is guiding her now as she sends Kylo’s lightsaber into legs and shoulders and arms, maiming and driving back and making it impossible for them to give her the jump later because they’re hurt. 

One by one, they fall before her, their blasters slashed in two or, in a moment of inspiration and instinct, Rey had sent one flying onto a rooftop with the Force. 

When they flee, but Rey does not give chase. She watches them go, her chest heaving, her blood pounding in her ears.

Then she turns and bends down over Kylo.

His face is a bloody mess, his nose is broken, his skin is bruised, his lip is split, and Rey’s hand travels across his chest.

There it is, his still-beating heart.

Her stomach grumbles, and she looks down at it.

They’d just been looking for food. The only person who was supposed to get hurt was Luke Skywalker. _He killed the last son, _one of the attackers had said_. _What did that mean? Was that one of the students that he’d killed at Luke’s Praxeum? But that will have been years ago at this point.

He’d killed how many people in his life—would he even remember this?

Rey swallows, and looks down at him.

If this had happened days ago, she would have left him without hesitation. Monster, creature in a mask.

But something’s different now. Maybe because the mask is gone and she can’t stop thinking about his kriffing eyes, had noticed the muscles of his torso, the hair below his belly-button as he’d stuck bacta on himself. 

_In any event, I apologize._

She grabs his arm. She bends her legs and heaves him up over her shoulders. He really is huge, but Rey’s strong and she breathes and centers herself and feels the Force flow into her muscles. 

She takes off at a run, back to the port, Kylo Ren across her back and his lightsaber swinging from her hip.

She loads him onto the ship first, settling him on the lower bunk before taking his lightsaber and igniting it and descending from the ship again.

She levels the blade at the portmaster. “Unhook us, now,” she commands in a low voice.

The portmaster replies in his broken pidgin. _What is happening? They haven’t filled more than a quarter of the tank yet. _

“You mean to keep us here so your lowlife scum can kill us? The Supreme Leader will know about this. Unhook us now and refund us what we didn’t take.”

The portmaster is about to protest when Rey presses the lightsber closer to his skin. “Don’t test me,” she whispers. She’d learned that the most frightening of gangsters on Jakku were the ones who spoke quietly, not the ones who shouted.

It works.

The portmaster barks commands and his goons thrust money at her as they unhook the ship from the fuel lines. She boards again and closes the gang plank behind her and is about to go and prepare the ship for takeoff when—

She doesn’t know the passcode. He never gave it to her.

They’re trapped here unless she wakes him.

She looks back at him, sprawled and bleeding across the bunk.

She doesn’t want to wake him. She doesn’t want to hurt him more.

But she crosses the distance between them and kneels down next to him. She doesn’t know where to poke that won’t be making it worse. 

_I’m sorry, _she thinks as she reaches for him, taking his hand and squeezing it and pressing against him with the Force.

His blackened eyes open.

“I don’t know how to take us off,” she says. “I don’t know your code.”

He blinks at her blearily. Then he sits up. She sees what little color in his face that isn’t covered in blood and bruises blanch. He staggers to the computer and punches in a code and Rey throws herself into the pilot’s seat, taking them to the stars.

Behind her, she hears him stumbling to the fresher and vomiting. She hears him fumbling and moving around and more vomiting. She hears water running as the sky gets darker and darker and spattered with stars.

She doesn’t know where to take them.

She doesn’t know if anyone’s following them.

She gets up and goes towards the fresher.

“Kylo,” she says through the door. 

He doesn’t reply.

“I don’t know where to navigate us to,” she calls. 

She hears a deep, shuddering breath, and the door opens.

His chest and stomach are covered in bruises and it makes her head swim just looking at it. He brushes past her, moving slowly to the navicomputer. He punches in coordinates, waits for the ship to adjust, then pulls them into hyperspace.

He sinks to the ground after that, leaning his forehead against the console.

“What can I—” Rey starts to ask, but he’s keeled over unconscious again and before she even knows it’s happening, she cushions his head with the Force so that it doesn’t hit the ground too hard. 

She takes a deep breath.

He’d be livid with her if she tried it while he was awake. But he’s not awake, and she doesn’t want to pick him up and hurt him more.

She’d managed his lightsaber and she had almost gotten her gloves done properly. She takes a deep breath and reaches.

Slowly he rises. Slowly, he floats through the air towards the bunk.

Sweat is streaming down Rey’s face. She is concentrating harder than she’s ever concentrated on anything in her life. She doesn’t want to make any of it worse. She doesn’t want to hurt him more. Inch by inch, he moves through the passage. His blood drips onto the floor. 

When at last she lowers him onto the bed, she turns to the fresher, digging through the cabinets to find what little bacta that they had left after his first scuffle. _My fault, _she thinks. It doesn’t hurt, not exactly, but she feels a twinge of guilt. For all she’d imagined him getting hurt, getting beaten, it was quite another thing to actually see it in front of her. This planet was different from the last. 

She scurries—almost sheepish—to the bunk and crouches down next to him. She begins to soak up the blood on his face and apply bacta to the bruising there before pausing.

For all his face is an utter wreck right now, they’d kicked his ribs and stomach more. She remembered from a bowl of gruel at Niima Outpost to of Plutt’s men talking about kicking a man in the stomach so hard he died. _Not protected where it counts, _one of them had laughed. 

Laughed.

She feels like she’s going to be sick and starts slathering bacta over the skin of his abdomen. She has no idea if bacta even heals more than cuts but if his gut is damaged. If there’s bleeding.

She doesn’t realize she’s crying until he mumbles, “Don’t cry, Kira,” in the dark and she goes still.

His eyes aren’t open. Or maybe he’s just confused after the attack. He’d probably hit his head. It would be feasible for him to think Kira was there at his side and not Rey. 

It would make sense for him to have forgotten Rey completely.

Her throat tightens at that thought.

“Shh,” she says gently. “You should be resting.”

“Don’t cry,” he repeats, his eyes still closed. “I’ll be fine.”

She takes a slow breath, then goes back to the bacta. Then, a moment later, he’s laughing.

“Didn’t know you cared.”

Rey gapes at him. His eyes are still closed. Does he think he’s talking to Kira still, or has he come to? He knows that Kira cares about him. She chose him over Luke, after all. 

Then suddenly his eye cracks open and he looks at her. “Do you care, Rey?” he emphasizes her name. Either he’s caught himself in his slip-up or…or…she doesn’t know. Her mouth is dry.

“Shut up and let me heal you,” she grunts and he winces more than smiles. 

“If you let me teach you, there’s a way to do that through the Force.”

“Just for that, I’m not going to ask you even more,” she snaps, a little too breathless for her own liking. Why is she breathless? He’s being extremely frustrating, blowing hot and cold and—and—

“Suit yourself,” he shrugs. “I’ll just convalesce slowly.”

“Can’t you heal yourself, if you’re so powerful with the Force?” she snaps.

“Not this way,” he replies. “It’s a way of the Light Side. I’ve forgone.”

“Then how could you teach me?” she asks, suddenly curious.

“Something tells me you’re too stubborn to want to learn from the Dark Side,” he replies. “And it’s not like I never studied it.”

She stares at him for a long time, trying to process that. “You’re so determined to teach me that you would even teach me what you don’t practice?” she asks him slowly.

“Sure,” he replies. “It’s what my uncle never did for me.”

**Kylo**

Ben doesn’t remember precisely when he loses consciousness.

He remembers that he regained it, that Kira—Rey—was there. That she was crying. He remembers offering to teach her again. He remembers his mother shaking her head in disappointment, remembers Uncle Luke standing over him with that lightsaber again—

That’s what wakes him.

His uncle’s eyes gleaming green at him in the dark.

He heaves over the side of the bunk, retching nothing but acidic clear foam. No blood. That’s a very good sign.

Kylo looks up towards the cockpit. He sees her feet hanging over the edge of one of the chairs and she’s peering around the back of it towards him. 

A moment later, she’s crouching down next to him, helping him lean back against the bunk. “We are out of bacta,” she tells him. Great. “And we’re running low on fuel again.” Even better.

He takes a deep breath. It hurts. Bruising on his ribs.

Silently, he curses himself. How the _fuck_ had he not known that was coming? Especially after what had happened on that other vermin-ridden…

“I’m going to take a shower,” he says, trying to sit up, but Rey’s hands are firmly on his shoulder.

“You’re not going to do anything that might hurt yourself until I can get you more bacta,” she says firmly.

“Or until you let me teach you.” 

She glares at him.

“At this point, what’s the point?” he gripes at her. “You want to hold a high ground? Is that it?” Rey’s glare only deepens. “Because it can’t be that you think I’m such a monster as all that. Otherwise you’d have let those goons kill me the way you wanted to let them lock me up for forever. So what is it?”

Rey swallows. He has her, he can tell he has her. 

But the words that slip out of his mouth are, “So why did you save me?”

Rey looks at him, and Kylo could laugh because he recognizes that look.

Rey is jarring.

She is so very unlike Kira in some ways, but stars if her eyes aren’t Kira’s right now. _Don’t lose the fight. You lose the fight, you lose the war, _her eyes say. But she’d already lost the fight, because he’s here, and breathing.

If it didn’t hurt to move, he’d reach for her.

Instead, he smiles. 

“Sympathy for the beast,” he says quietly. “You think me a monster, but you’ve grown attached.” 

“I have not,” she flares at once before rolling her eyes and saying, “Kira’s a better liar.”

The look she gives him then is devastated, as though the words had slipped out of her lips without her planning to and the impact of them is hitting them at the same time they’re hitting him.

Her cheeks pinken. Her eyes go bright. 

But she doesn’t look away.

If she’s afraid, she faces it. 

_Brave._

And his throat is dry because there’s such beauty in her bravery right now. She’d saved his life, and now she is refusing to turn away from the truth of that. He might even matter to her.

“You confuse me,” she says at last. “You do unforgiveable things, but I don’t think you want to do them.”

“This again?” He can’t help rolling his eyes. “Do you really thing I do anything I don’t want to do?”

“You studied with Luke for years and years,” she replies and she has him there, pinned and wriggling against a wall like a dying serpent. “I think you will always do things you don’t want to do. And you chose the hateful things because it’s easier to bear those, somehow.”

“That doesn’t make—” Unbidden, the thought that he’d tamped down for years fills his mind. What would have if he had responded to his uncle’s _Ben, no! _before bringing the roof down on his head? What if he’d done that thing he knows he should have done, that thing he couldn’t bear to do, and faced his uncle, tall, straight-backed? What if he’d told him _you violated me as Snoke has done, _and let his uncle live with that but to choose to be something other than a creature who reacted in pain and who made his pain worse because the Dark Side takes power in its own pain. “—sense.”

_Kira’s a better liar._

He looks away from her.

_Coward_.

She deserves more than a coward.

“You saved me because you think you can save my soul?” he asks her. It sounds like he’s crying which is how he realizes the dampness on his cheeks isn’t sweat.

“No,” Rey says quietly. “I think you can save yourself.”

“And if I don’t want to?” he tries to snarl.

He can’t see her, but he can practically hear her shrugging, she subtle shift of the fibers of her tunic.

“Then I think you still don’t know what you want.”

“And what do you want?” he says, turning to face her and immediately regretting it.

She’s Kira, sitting there. The one person to ever choose him—except she’s not Kira. Kira doesn’t look at him with hope in her eyes, and a belief in…in he doesn’t know what.

She believes in him, but not like this. Not that he can be something brighter than he is. She believes he can be stronger than he is. The two aren’t the same. 

Rey’s makes his throat go dry.

He can’t remember what he had asked, which seems to be just fine because Rey’s sitting there, looking winded. She’s blinking and her eyes are bright. 

She takes a slow, shuddering breath, her lungs expanding and retracting in Kira’s uniform. Kira only ever breathes that hard when she’s trying to get control of herself, when she’s trying to hide something from the world, when her thoughts are swirling and she risks losing her temper.

Rey looks like she might cry.

But again, she is brave.

“Habitually things I can’t have,” she says quietly. “My parents. My—sister.” There are tears dripping down her face now and Kylo reaches up a hand to wipe them away. Her lips curve into a quiet oh, her eyes get wide.

And suddenly tears are flowing down her confused face as though she doesn’t understand why she’s crying.

But of course she doesn’t.

Kira’s a better liar than Rey, but Rey hadn’t remembered Kira at all. How much else had she forgotten? Did she forget the knife that hurt her too, or had she always known but never let herself think about it because she didn’t know how to shield herself from the pain?

“You can’t make it hurt less,” he whispers to her. “But you can try and let it go. It helps—to let it go.”

“Is that why you’re hunting your uncle down to kill him? To let him go?”

“I—” he cuts himself off. Angry heat has flooded him and it’s making his heart beat faster and it hurts. A lot, actually.

Whatever pain makes it to his face, though, Rey understands because immediately, she’s on her feet again. “I’ll make a compress at least,” he hears her say as she disappears towards the fresher. “And I’ll try and navigate us towards something that might have bacta.”

“Rey,” he calls after her. He can already hear the water running. “Let me just fucking teach you.”

The water turns off. Rey returns holding a small wet towel. 

“What if I can’t do it?” she asks.

“Then we find a system with bacta. You won’t be able to heal all of me anyway—not without draining yourself too much. But at least some of this.” 

She swallows.

She considers.

She nods.

**Rey**

She feels as empty as the Jakku desert, her body sapped dry of a life energy she didn’t know she had.

Kylo had made her stop after she’d repaired three of his broken ribs. It was barely a fraction of the damage done to his body. “You’ll tap yourself out,” he told her. “That was good, but you aren’t an endless supply. You’ll need to build up your stamina.”

He still winces most of the way he moves. He hadn’t let her touch his internal organs—those are more complicated than he’s willing to teach her without medical charts to guide her around his gut. But he seems happy with being able to breathe a little better and seems positively cheerful as he shuffles to the cockpit to work on navigating the ship down to the incoming—

It’s tiny, the—is it a planet?

She’s too tired to know.

“An asteroid,” he says. “But there’s life there, and where there’s life there’ll be fuel.”

“Are you sure?” Rey asks. But he seems confident enough, and she lets herself just sit there in the co-pilot’s seat, feeling useless.

“You’re not useless.”

“Don’t read my mind.”

“I wasn’t. It was on your expression,” he says, twiddling some dials. “You forget your face does the same thing as Kira’s.”

Right. Kira. 

She had, in fact, forgotten that, but she’ll blame how tired she is right now. Her limbs feel heavy. Everything feels cold.

He’d called her Kira while he’d been delirious in his pain. 

In his eyes, he could see flickers of recognition more times than not, him knowing what Kira would say, what Kira would think. What Kira would do? 

And then she remembers the face before she’d started letting him teach her. Like he’d been punched in the gut far more painfully than those bandits had kicked him the day before. Like he was winded, breathless, floating, falling. Had Kira ever made him look at her like that?

What little energy she has flares in her then. _He doesn’t want to be this and he knows it too. _

“What did you want to be when you were little?” she asks him.

He snorts. “Didn’t have a lot of choice in that,” he replies dryly. “Straight off to Jedi school with me, bursting with the Force as I was. Why?”

“Yes,” Rey ignores his question. “But what did you want to be, when you let yourself hope?” 

He pauses, and for a moment she wonders if he’s just going to stop talking to her the way he does when he’s annoyed. Except, a moment later, he says, “I wanted to be a pilot like my dad.” His voice is quiet. “He was a great pilot. A shit smuggler, but a great pilot. I liked the idea of just…just going off to see the stars. Find the fastest ship in the galaxy and see how much faster I could make her run.”

His eyes are trained forward on the asteroid ahead of them. His face is too bashed and bruised for her to really know what’s on his mind. 

They land and the computers warn them that oxygen levels are dangerously low on the asteroid, so Kylo gets them both masks to put over their faces. Then they disembark.

There’s even more trouble communicating with the locals here, but it’s not long before a fuel line is connected to the ship. Then Kylo takes Rey’s arm and for a second she thinks he’s going to drag her but no—no he’s holding himself up.

“Are you all right?” she asks him quietly.

“Just lightheaded,” he says.

“You could go lie—”

“No,” he says firmly. “I’m not leaving you out here alone.”

“Because there’s no way I could handle myself?” Rey responds, heat creeping up her neck.

“No, because I don’t want anything to happen to you.” For a moment she’s breathless. Has anyone ever thought that about her? Has anyone ever said it to her?

_Are you so starved for kindness that you respond so readily? _She snaps at herself. Except it feels overly harsh, somehow. Kylo keeps showing her kindness. He keeps trying to help her. _You just are softening to him because you’re alone. If Finn were here, you’d remember what a monster he is. A murderer. A villain. A monster in a mask._

A monster in a mask who has lost his mask. A villain who has been battered and bruised trying to keep her safe. A murderer who seems to hate himself for his crimes.

_What path exists for a murderer who hates his crime except more darkness? For surely if he turns away, justice will claim him and then what can he do?_

She rests her hand on his and peeks up at him over the oxygen mask. He’s looking at her cautiously. _Can you be what I think you might be? _

_Or are you only ever what Kira knew?_

On Jakku, she remembers a madame telling one of her girls that you can never change a man. Trying is hell, and the results never stick. But surely that’s different from waiting for him to change himself? To see if he can? 

Rey wishes she had someone she could ask—anyone except Kylo Ren holding her arm as they make their way towards the large public hall at the edge of the port.

Rey slows.

There’s a faint buzzing in her ears, something familiar and warm at the edge of her awareness. 

Her eyes land on a woman in an oxygen mask who is sitting outside the entrance of the public hall. There’s something oddly familiar about her. 

“Rey?” Kylo asks her.

She’s gone completely still and the woman looks up—

And her eyes are a bright hazel, and the same shape as Rey’s.

They stare at one another for a long while. Each waiting for the other to move. Kylo’s grip tightens on her arm and she feels his bodyweight shift as though he’s going to reach for his lightsaber, as though he’s deemed her a threat.

_Is he wrong?_

Is that Kira’s voice, or Rey’s?

Rey stares at her, and stares at her, and stares at her.

Then, she whispers, “Mom?”

And the spell breaks.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, sorry for being a bit late on this update! I had a bonkers day at work and was traveling and helping announce the next volume of [the RCA](https://reylocharityanthology.tumblr.com/post/188743045114/the-reylo-charity-anthology-volume-2-across-the) and didn't have enough hours in the day. 
> 
> Thank you, once again, for your kind reviews. I haven't had the spoons to do nearly as much as I'd like lately and haven't gotten to replies yet but thank you, thank you thank you. Hope you enjoy this chapter!

**Finn**

“It shouldn’t be taking this long,” Poe mutters to him.

“What do you mean?” Finn asks.

“If it’s taking this long, it means they’re negotiating. If they’re negotiating, it means they’re less on our side than we thought.” Poe grimaces. “I’m glad we destroyed that base. But it did its job. It terrified everyone, and I’d be willing to bet that no matter what we say, they’re still worried they’ll go the same way as the Hosnian system.”

They’re standing by one of the transports, and Poe knocks his hand lightly into the ship, clearly trying to let out some of his impatience and frustration without actually hitting the thing.

“The First Order is frightening. You can’t blame them for wanting to stay alive,” Finn says.

Poe gives him a sidelong glance. “It’s cowardice. Cowardice that’ll mean more people get killed. And I get it—not everyone can be brave. But I’d still prefer something bigger than cowardice.”

Finn swallows.

They’ve never actually talked about it—why he deserted the First Order. Too much was happening too quickly, and then he’d thought Poe was dead, and then there’d been rescuing Rey and by then everyone—like Rose—had assumed he was some big damn hero. 

He feels something constrict in his throat. Maybe it’s because Rose had snapped at him or because Rey had kissed him, but he doesn’t think he can do it anymore—keep pretending to be something he’s not. 

“Sometimes cowardice can motivate in different ways,” Finn says, steeling himself. “That’s why I deserted. Cowardice.”

Something changes in Poe’s eyes, but not the way Finn had expected. Something flickers, a curiosity, an understanding, but he stays quiet, clearly waiting for Finn to continue, which is how he knows he’s caught Poe off guard. Poe never stays quiet about stuff like this. 

He swallows, nervous. “I didn’t want to do what they were doing anymore. I didn’t want to kill people or hurt people. I—”

“That’s not cowardice, Finn. That’s bravery.”

“No, you don’t get it,” Finn continues with an angry huff. “It’s not bravery. I wasn’t trying to—to join the Resistance. I wanted to get out and hide. Live in hiding for the rest of my life. Because I know what they are—I know there’s no beating them, I…” Poe’s face isn’t changing. If anything his expression is getting warmer, his smile more understanding. He rests a hand on Finn’s shoulder. 

“Bravery means standing up to the things that frighten us,” he tells Finn. “Even if that is running away. You were telling something _no more_, and they don’t like hearing that. It’s bravery, even if it’s not…” he takes a deep breath. “You’re here now, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, and I’m still not convinced I shouldn’t run off and hide from everything.” There. He’s said it—in as many words as he’s meant it. 

He expects Poe to rage at him, for the warmth on his face to cool. But instead, Poe shrugs. “Why are you still here, then?”

“Rey,” Finn blurts out. But that’s not all of it. Not completely.

He can’t forget Kylo through the fires of Taunul. This man who’d crushed Rey, who’d saved his life, who’d destroyed a village. Even though he _knew_ it wasn’t the truth, one man seemed far more defeatable than an entire order. Kylo Ren was just a man, wasn’t he? 

Except, _no_, he wasn’t—he was a man who could freeze blasts with his hand. There was _nothing_ Finn could do to defeat him. He’s smart enough to know that, even if his damn gut isn’t.

Poe’s watching him closely—with the sort of intensity that makes Finn wonder if he can read his mind. “So you stick around as long as you stick around. We’re not the First Order—we don’t force people to work for us. If you think the best way to keep yourself alive is to—”

“Wait, are you telling me—”

“The worst soldier is a scared soldier,” Poe says and Finn gets a shiver. _No fear, _his commandants had always told him. _Fear makes you do stupid things. Will get your brothers in arms killed. Will destroy the attack, break us before the enemy. No fear. _“If you’re afraid for something, sometimes that motivates you. I’m afraid too—that we’re going to lose, that we’re all going to die, that the galaxy will never know an ounce of freedom ever again. But that’s motivational for me. It’s not gonna break me. If your fear means you break ranks, then you shouldn’t be here.” Poe gives him a look that Finn doesn’t recognize. “But for what it’s worth—you’ve never struck me as the type who’ll let others die because you’re afraid. Like you said—you didn’t want more people to die. That’s why you broke with the First Order. Because there was a slaughter in Taunul. It was murder. Not war.”

Finn remembers Kylo Ren, standing tall over the old man, raising his lightsaber and slicing him down. The same man had tortured Poe, had tortured Rey—had seen him not firing his saber and hadn’t killed him, or reported him. 

“You’ve got time to figure it out,” Poe says, and it almost takes his breath away. He can’t, for the life of him, imagine Captain Phasma giving him the time to come to terms with himself, his instinct to keep himself alive. She’d have destroyed him for it. Poe though…

“Why are you giving me that time, but not the governance of Chandrila?” Finn asks, and Poe grimaces.

“Because you’re one man versus the universe. _They_ are in charge of the lives of millions. They don’t have the luxury of introspection when that much depends on them. They should know what’s wrong and take a stand or else they’re morally reprehensible. You…” he shrugs. “Well, I think you’ll come round to the right side. So I’m not gonna say something that’s gonna push you in the other direction. I trust you. You got me out of there. And whatever you say about being a coward—that was an act of heroism.” He claps Finn on the shoulder again. 

“You think I don’t know what I am?” Finn does his best not to narrow his eyes.

“I think you’re afraid of what you could be. And I think you’re brave, whatever you say, so I think you’ll be exactly that. Because you can’t be brave if you’re not a little bit afraid.” 

He looks at him. He can see the urgency in his face, can see the flaring pride, the fiery determination that the Resistance is right, and that they’re doing all they can to stop the destruction that the First Order might bring. But Poe also sees Finn as a person as much as a brother in arms.

Finn swallows.

He doesn’t want to run away from _that_.

Poe’s head turns sharply. “They’re here.”

And they are. The General is walking with Han Solo and a tall woman with purple hair that Finn’s never seen before. “We can’t stay long,” the General tells Poe, but before Poe can react, she continues, “But we do have a long-term base we can go to on Naboo. So we’ll refuel here, restock, and take our leave.”

“Naboo?” Poe asks.

“My cousin has been in touch,” Leia responds, “She’s going to find someplace safe for us to lay low.”

“That’s something,” Poe says, but he doesn’t sound pleased.

“We can’t force Chandrila to support us,” Leia says. “They’re already harboring us and restocking us. That’s more than enough.”

“Yeah, but Naboo—”

“Is complicated,” Leia says. “But Pooja’s always been on the side of the Light and she’s not afraid. She’s a Naberrie, after all.” Finn doesn’t know what this means, but it seems to mean _something_ to Poe, because he nods.

“Will we ever be able to actually face them, though?” Finn asks. “They outnumber us a hundred to one, and have an army that—” He swallows. The General is looking at him with knowing eyes, soft eyes, gentle eyes. 

“Running isn’t going to work,” she says. “And you’re thinking too much the way they want you to think, which is understandable. You were trained by them. But the Rebellion brought down the Empire—not through open battle, but through careful tactics and guerilla warfare. You don’t need an army of tens of thousands if you have ten good men.”

_You’re one of my ten good men, _her eyes tell him and goosebumps erupt on his arms. 

“Anyway,” Leia says, turning back to Poe. “We need to make sure everyone’s ready for a fast turnaround. Should be doable since we didn’t bring people down from the ships yet.”

“On it,” Poe says, turning towards the transport. 

“Oh, and Poe,” he pauses and looks back at the General. “Depending on what we need when we reach Naboo, I may not be able to direct the fleet as I would like. Something tells me I’ll need to be more Senator than General. In case that needs to happen, I want to be prepared and you’ll be reporting into Vice Admiral Holdo effective immediately.”

“The battle of Chiron Belt Holdo?” Poe asks, excitement dawning across his face.

“The very same,” says the tall woman with the violet hair who had remained so silent that Finn had almost forgotten she was there. She extends a hand. Poe shakes it. “Looking forward to working with you, Captain.”

“And you, Vice Admiral,” Poe says, the eagerness in his voice changing slightly. Clearly he hadn’t been expecting this woman to be the Vice Admiral. His eyes shift briefly to General Organa but the General has already disappeared back towards the meeting rooms. 

Holdo makes her way up the gangplank of the transport and Poe glances at Finn before following her. Finn trails after all of them.

“Everything ok?” Finn asks him when they’ve made it through the portal of the ship, but Poe just gives him a significant look that Finn does not for the life of him understand before crossing the transport to go and sit with Vice Admiral Holdo.

The ride back up to the fleet is short, and Poe follows Holdo to wherever it is she disappears to, leaving Finn completely alone. 

His feet take him to Rey, who he finds on the Engineering deck with Rose. The two seem to have become fast friends in the few short days that they’ve known one another, but that doesn’t surprise him. He and Rey had gotten close fast too. There’s something about her like that. He feels a little bit guilty over the fact that it doesn’t seem to be something that was special for him. Rey’s fiercely independent, after all. The fact of those two things alone should quash the mild jealousy he feels seeing her sitting and talking with Rose.

“Well?” Rey asks. “Are we making base?”

He shakes his head. “No, we’re going to Naboo,” he says. “They won’t host us here, but the General has family there who’s going to help out.”

“Naboo,” Rey repeats.

“That’s so far,” says Rose.

“Yeah,” Finn agrees, though he definitely has no idea where Naboo actually is on a star chart. He trusts Rose not to speak in ignorance. “Yeah, it is.”

“So Chandrila isn’t helping at all?” Rey asks. She looks so glum, biting her lower lip between her teeth, and he wants to hold her hand or something, hug her. But not in front of Rose. He’s never understood how people can be affectionate with one another in front of others, and even handholding means something else now. And besides—they still haven’t actually talked. He’s not even sure that they _need_ to, given that she’d kissed him, but he also doesn’t know that they don’t need to. But they also can’t talk while Rose is there with them. He doesn’t want something to happen like it did with Tallie when all of this got started to begin with.

So he says, “They’re restocking us, and refueling us, but other than that, no.”

Rey takes a deep breath and tries to smile. It doesn’t quite reach her eyes. “We can’t give up hope, I suppose.”

“No,” Rose agrees. She gives Finn a look that tells him quite plainly that she has not forgotten what he’d said. “We can’t.”

Finn steels himself. 

_Because you can’t be brave if you’re not a little bit afraid._

“We’ve gotta be brave, I guess.” 

It feels terrifying.

**Kira**

“We’re going to Naboo. Chandrila wouldn’t provide aid.” 

Veesh Ren cocks his head in the holo, and Kira could throttle him. She knows he’s going to ask before he asks it.

“That’s all well and good,” he says benignly, “But why isn’t Organa dead yet?”

“I haven’t exactly had escape opportunities,” she tells him, rolling her eyes. “It’s not like I can just hop an escape pod when we’re in hyperspace.”

“Fools have done worse.”

“Yeah, but not fools who actually want to have control over where they end up and who to signal to get them the kriff out of the escape pod once they’ve hit regular cruising speeds,” Kira snaps back. “Chandrila restocked them, and they’re going to hide on Naboo next.”

Veesh doesn’t speak for a long moment. “Of course, Organa the hypocrite. Denounces her father saying that her true father was of Alderaan but seeks support from the Naberries. But how unsurprising, given how that family treats its own.”

Vividly, she remembers Ben’s face when he’d stood in front of her on that dark, rainy night, having seen death in his uncle’s face. Even more vividly, she remembers his mother’s sadness only a few days before, her faith in him. _There’s good in him._

_She isn’t wrong, _Kira thinks. If Kylo were pure cruelty, he wouldn’t be Kylo. He’s always treated his own well—always treated her well.

“Report back in when you next have the chance,” Veesh says. “And don’t forget your assignment. The Supreme Leader won’t.”

“Copy that,” she says and she ends the call. She takes the scrambler off her holo and tucks it into her belt pouch. The holo goes into the inside pocket of the grey vest they’d given her before leaving D’Qar, Rey’s desert silks left behind for good.

_Prick_, she thinks. It rankles, Veesh telling her to report in, as though she won’t. _Micromanaging prick. _But of course he’s micromanaging her. He doesn’t trust her. He doesn’t trust anyone. She wonders how Kylo deals with him, but then again, Veesh reports into Kylo. _Megalomaniac_.

She makes her way through the ship, thinking dark thoughts about Veesh Ren, unable to shake the question that he’d asked. _But why isn’t Organa dead yet? _

Because she could easily have done it right now, while they were still docked on Chandrila. Jettisoned an escape pod, snuck past what meagre excuse they had for a palace guard and killed her just like that. She could have stood over her with her bleeding lightsaber. _Your brother did this to your son, did you know? Kylo threw him off though. You though…_

Or maybe she wouldn’t say anything at all, choke her from afar the way Vader had always done it to the people he’d killed.

It wasn’t that she couldn’t.

It was that she didn’t want to. Not yet. It didn’t feel right, somehow. _Follow your orders, _she could practically hear Kylo growl in her ear. That was what she was good at—following orders. That’s what her parents and then Luke had beaten into her. Kylo’s were the first orders she’d _wanted _to follow, but with every passing day, she couldn’t help but wonder if he’d want her to kill his mother.

He’d say he would, but he’d never been a liar. He is possibly the worst liar she’d ever known.

And she doesn’t want to hurt him.

She doesn’t want to hurt Leia either.

Which is how she ended up standing very still in an empty corridor, breathing deeply, staring at nothing. _You got attached. How? How did you get attached?_

She doesn’t want to hurt Finn, though she still doesn’t even know _why_ she’s carrying on with this charade that he’s now Rey’s boyfriend. It’s not like he’ll ever see Rey again. The First Order is going to want to kill him—him more than everyone else because he’s a deserter. 

She doesn’t want to hurt Rose either. Rose, whose friendship she’d sparked because she’d known that, at some point, she’d get tech specs for the Resistance.

She doesn’t want to hurt any of them. Because what was the _point_? What was it? Why did she _care_ what Snoke wanted when these people treated her more like a human than anyone who worked for Snoke ever had? Finn was _right_ to defect. He’d been _brave_ to do it. If it weren’t for the strength of her Force signature that followed her through the stars like a bullseye, she’d easily be able to disappear right now, and Veesh Ren, and the Supreme Leader would never know what happened to her.

_And that would hurt Kylo._

The crushing truth. The one she can’t bear. What would she bear in her life, not to hurt Kylo?

“Hey, you ok?”

She focuses her eyes and Rose is standing there next to her. 

Kira looks at her and her mind is blank. She can’t find a lie.

But it turns out she doesn’t need one. Rose takes her hand and pulls her to the side. “I know it’s a lot sometimes,” she says. “The enormity of what we’re doing. But we’ll win. I know we will. We’re stronger than we seem—strong because of one another. We have one another’s backs, which is more than I can say for anyone who works for the First Order.”

_I have Kylo’s back, and he has mine._

_Veesh doesn’t though. He’d watch me die. Him and the rest._

Finn would fight to save her, kicking and screaming until he was gunned down. He’d thrown himself onto Starkiller base to save Rey, after all.

To save Rey.

They all think she’s Rey.

They wouldn’t care at all about Kira.

They’d all watch Kira burn.

Just like Veesh.

“It’ll be ok,” Rose tells her again, squeezing her hand a little tighter. 

“How can you know that? How can you know we’re stronger than we seem?”

“Because that’s what families are. Stronger together.”

“I’ve never had a family.” Only Kylo had ever come close. And Rey. Rey, wherever she was, wherever she is. Rey who’d spit in her face and who, even now, Kira hopes is ok. 

“You do now,” Rose says, and she’s standing close enough that Kira can feel her breath on her cheek, warm and oddly comforting. Her hand is still in Kira’s. “You’re our family. Mine, and Paige’s, and Finn’s, and everyone’s. We’re all in it together. Don’t lose hope.”

Hope. 

She can’t remember the last time she felt hopeful. Hope’s a surefire way to get yourself killed in her book. Hope’s dangerous. 

But she hides that when she looks down at Rose. “Hope,” she breathes out. She likes the way that Rose’s eyes sparkle at her when she says that word.

She doesn’t have any hope at all—nothing that tells her it’ll be all right if she kills Leia Organa, nothing that tells her it’ll be all right if she doesn’t.

**Rey**

“So you lived.” 

Her voice is not how Rey remembers it at all—if she remembers it at all. It is raspy and dry, like she’s wheezing, like she can’t breathe despite the gas mask. 

“Yes,” Rey says, excitement filling her. She steps forward and Kylo’s hand is still on her arm and she rounds on him, glaring. _Let go, _she tells him silently.

He doesn’t.

“Rey,” he says quietly.

“You were supposed to die.”

Rey’s head snaps around, her eyes on her mother again. Her mother looks angry. “You’re telling me we gave Plutt a functional slave?”

And despite the oxygen mask on her face, she finds she can’t breathe. She can’t do anything at all except stare at the woman who is staring at her. She sees traces of herself in the woman’s face, in the color of her hair, in the shape of her skull. But she sees nothing of herself beyond the color in the woman’s eyes.

She is harsh, and cold, and angry.

“I waited for you,” Rey hears herself say from far away.

“Of course you did,” the woman says. “You were always a sniffling brat.”

“That’s enough.” Kylo’s voice cuts between them, harder than she’s ever heard it before.

“But it looks like you did like me and found yourself a man to take care of you. You shouldn’t have done that. Should have found the strength in yourself.” The woman starts to cough into her mask and Kylo’s lightsaber is in his hand, ignited, pointing right at her throat.

“Enough,” he says. “Not another word out of you.”

“Or what. You’ll kill me?” Her mother gives Kylo such a strange look. “Do you really think I want to be alive? Go on, sonny. Do it, and you have my blessing. Just don’t hit the kids when you have them, all right? It only makes them cry louder.”

And suddenly Kylo is dragging Rey away and she’s limp like a doll in his wake. Her body is tired, her soul is tired and her mind is just shut off and she doesn’t know how he has the energy or the strength to do it, given that he’d been leaning on her for support but suddenly they’re inside, now they’re at a table in a corner, now she’s in his arms and she’s crying into his chest because her mother—her mother—

“I should go talk to her,” she babbles. “I need to know why—”

“You don’t need to know why,” Kylo says. “Not anymore than what she just said. You don’t, Rey.”

“I do. I waited for her. They were going to come back for me.”

_We’ll be back!_

She has a memory of them saying that.

Doesn’t she?

Was it her mother’s voice?

Or was it her own?

Was it Kira’s?

“It’s your mind trying to protect you,” Kylo says fiercely, firmly. He snaps his fingers at one of the passing droids and a moment later there’s water in glasses in front of them. He lifts one to Rey’s face. “Drink.”

She does. She’s shaking. 

“You can’t change the past,” he tells her quietly. “It only has the power to hurt you. Let it die, Rey. Kill it if you have to. But you can’t be who you are meant to be if you cling to it, and if you go back out there.”

“I won’t,” she says numbly. She finishes the water and looks up at him. Through his bruising, he looks concerned. “I need to find you more bacta,” she says, getting to her feet.

“Rey,” he says.

“I’m not going to talk to her. I promise.”

And for once, she’s a better liar than Kira. 

She takes a deep breath as she walks, losing herself in a small crowd of people. They close in around her, more of them in a small space than she’s ever had to encounter before in her life, but she makes her way through, determined. She has gotten through worse than a crowd. She has never tried to shield herself with the Force before. She doesn’t even know if it’s possible. But she’d learned how to hide among the shadows as a young girl.

She’d had to learn that. From—

From—

Because of her mother.

So she sinks into the shadows and wonders if that will be enough to hide her from him. She tunes out the buzzing conversation of the watering hole around her, ignores the curious gazes. The only thing she can hear is her beating heart and the echoes of a child’s scream as she moves.

“Why?” she demands when she’s reached the front door. The woman is still sitting there.

Rey notices more about her now. She’s got a bowl in front of her to collect coins in, and a bottle of something that smells too strongly to be water sitting next to her. Her boots are ragged and have holes in the soles of them and when she speaks, Rey can see missing teeth through the clear portions of the oxygen mask.

“Did we leave you?” she asks.

“Yes,” Rey says. It’s different than it was before, when she’d been too winded. Now she is angry. Now she can feel that raw energy thrumming through her, the stubborn determination she’d cultivated from unyielding sand.

This woman _will _answer. She will.

“No answer’s going to be good enough for you, dearie,” her mother replies. “It wasn’t that we hated you. It was that we didn’t care about you.”

“I was a child.”

“And so was Kira. You were both always squabbling, but you—you were the one who didn’t stand up for yourself. So when we had to leave one of you behind, you were more worthless than she. Plutt always gets his debt back. Your father owed him coin, so we paid it off by giving him you.”

“And you were never going to come back?”

“Something we told Kira to make her stop screaming,” her mother says. She smiles. “There. You going to kill me now?”

Rey recoils. “You want me to kill you?”

“I told your boyfriend—I haven’t wanted to live for years. What’s one last devotion a daughter can give her mother? Go on, sweetie. I deserve it.”

Rey sees a contradictory desperation in the blankness. 

“You’re not as good a liar as Kira,” Rey says slowly, and something shifts in her mother’s eyes. “You’re trying to make me do it, aren’t you? Because you haven’t got the guts? You’re afraid to do it, so why not turn your daughter into a murderer.” She stands up straighter, her neck elongating as she looks down at her mother.

At long last, her mother shrugs. “Worth a shot,” she sighs. “But I suppose you were never strong enough to be like me. I did it for your father when the drink drove his mind bad.”

“No,” Rey says. “I’m not like you. You have no hand in what I’ve become.” Is that her heart pounding in her chest like a drum? “So what is it? What’s the truth that isn’t you trying to get me angry enough to murder you?”

“You have it already, sweetie,” the woman says with a horrible, mangle-mouthed smile. Is Rey imagining it or does she seem sorry?

For a moment, Rey stands on a precipice, her past before her. How long had she yearned for her mother, only for the galaxy to give her this? There is no soft, loving voice, no gentle hug. There’s just a broken woman out in the Unknown Regions, asking her for something she can’t do. 

_The belonging you seek isn’t behind you, it’s ahead, _Maz Kanata had told her on Takodana, not even an hour before Kylo had hunted her down and captured her. 

How is it that Kylo Ren seems less a monster to her now than her own mother?

Was he the future Maz had mentioned? 

Except no—surely—_surely_ it was Kira.

“Is that all?” she asks at last. “You have nothing more to say?”

Her mother shakes her head and takes her gas mask off to take a sip from her bottle.

“Very well then,” Rey says and without another word, without looking back, she goes back into the public hall to see if she can hunt down some bacta.

She can let the past die, then. But she refuses to kill it.

**Finn**

“You just point, and shoot, right?”

It had been a question asked sarcastically over lunch when Finn had been talking about what went into training stormtrooper regiments. They’d spent months on blaster techniques. 

“You’ve never fired one, have you,” he asks her sharply.

Rose’s face tightens. “I don’t want to kill people,” she says. 

“Even if they want to kill you? If it’s kill or be killed?” he responds.

Which is how they end up on a firing range, just him and Rose, because little by little, he’d realized that if Rose was ever facing blaster fire, she’d be dead meat. “They’ll pick you off,” he tells her, placing the blaster in her hand and showing her how to grip it. “And use your death to try and shake the others you’re with. That’s what they’re trained to do.”

Rose takes a deep, shuddering breath. She looks up at him as though she has something she wants to say, but thinks better of it. 

“Try pointing and shooting,” Finn says, nodding to the target. “See what happens.”

She does.

Her shot doesn’t even hit the target. She flinches.

“Yeah, pointing and shooting doesn’t work if you don’t know what you’re doing,” Finn tells her, doing his best not to sound like an ass. He’s trying not to be an ass. Even if Rose is at his throat sometimes, he doesn’t want her dead. It’d kill Rey if she died. And even if he’d only met Rose a few days ago, something tells him he’d be upset if it happened too.

“So teach me what to do,” she says quietly.

He corrects her posture, shifts her hips so that she’s squared away to her target. He corrects her grip, corrects her stance, shows her how to line up what she sees with where the blaster’s going to fire.

“You can’t line it up to what your eyes see,” he says. “Fundamentally—you can’t. Your eyes will always be higher than the nose of the blaster, and if you try to make them line up, the shot will go wild because you won’t actually be able to see your target.”

Rose nods. This time, when she fires, she hits the target.

The outer edges, not even on the outer rings, but she hits the target.

“That’ll stun them for four seconds,” Finn says. “Maybe five. Maybe none. But maybe four. That might give you time to make your escape.” 

She stays quiet through Finn’s next round of corrections. Her eyes are sad, angry, determined. Her lips are set. 

“What’s wrong?” Finn asks her when she doesn’t celebrate having landed her shot inside the target’s circles this time. 

“It feels too personal,” she says quietly before turning despairing eyes to Finn. “Funny, right? I hate the First Order, hate everything they’ve done, hate their men, hate their—” she cuts herself off. “But the idea of shooting a soldier and killing them.”

Finn rests a hand on her shoulder. “Speaking for the grunt level foot soldiers, I am grateful,” he says. “Most of them—they don’t care what the First Order is doing—”

“That makes it _worse_,” Rose protests.

“Maybe,” he replies gently. “But also that means that their deaths become meaningless. Death is meaningless.” He thinks of Taunul—how easily it had been for them to kill when he couldn’t lift his gun. Would it have been easy if it had been them that were getting slaughtered? “It’s different when you see the humanity of the people you’re killing,” he says. “It makes you not want to do it, makes you want to find another way.” Because there had to have been a better way than just putting down everyone in Taunul. 

“Feels easier to just blast them out of the stars,” Rose says sadly. “It’s the ship, not the person.”

Finn watches her for a long moment. “You’ve got a good heart, Rose Tico,” he says at last. He doesn’t really know why there’s a lump in his throat. He’s not a stormtrooper anymore, he doesn’t work for the First Order. But the idea that she’d see him, if he were, and not see him as the faceless enemy, despite his uniform, despite his mask…

She gives him a surprised look, then a flush creeps up her face. She looks down at the blaster and hands it to him. “Sorry I’ve been giving you a hard time,” she says. “You weren’t what I thought you were.”

“Yeah,” he says. “If it’s any consolation, I’m not what I thought I was, either. But I’m not running from that anymore.”

Poe had called him brave where he’d only ever thought of himself as a coward. 

She smiles, her lips quirking up and Finn wonders what it would be like to pull her into his arms, to hold her, kiss her.

Except he had. What sort of horrible person was he that he’d even think that about Rose? Sure, he was a coward, but he wasn’t _that_.

He extends a hand. “Friends?”

Rose’s smile only widens, her eyes closing and the smile brightening her face so much it sort of takes his breath away.

“Yeah, friends.”

She shakes his hand and his stomach does a thing and his breath catches in his throat and he only feels that much more confused.

**Kira**

Training simulations have always been calming for her. They are controlled—no true danger, but a way for her to be sure that she is at her best. She can run through every possibility of what might happen, can prepare herself for the inevitability of an unexpected attack. And of course, Resistance simulations have the added benefit of making it so that when she is back with the First Order, she’ll be more adequately prepared to crush them. She’ll know they’re every move, their every tactic.

She spends a lot of time in the simulation modules. Poe thinks it’s because she’s dedicated to the cause, but really it’s because the strange rioting in her brain goes quiet when she is in a simulation pod. She doesn’t have to wonder whether Kylo would hate her for killing his mother, no matter what he’d say or pretend. She doesn’t have to wonder whether she’d hate herself for killing Leia Organa, who has extended nothing but kindness to her.

_Don’t trust kindness, _an old instinct tells her. _Even the kind will lie and hurt if they must. _

Her parents had not been kind, but Luke had been, and look what that had done? A rainy night and Ben’s face a mask of betrayal, blood on his hands, hurt in his heart and a one more past that Kira could never go back to. 

She doesn’t have to think about the way that Finn and Rose are getting along now either. She sees them joking with one another in the mess hall, sees the way they look at one another out of the corner of their eyes when the other isn’t paying attention, when they think no one will notice.

Kira notices though. 

_He’s Rey’s boyfriend, he shouldn’t be looking at her like that, _she thinks huffily, while trying to quiet the confusion in her heart that makes her wish that both—either—would look at her like that when they think she doesn’t notice. _Don’t get attached._

She can’t get attached.

It is the one wisdom of the Jedi: attachment is a weakness, for what will happen when, inevitably, she has to hurt them. Because this will not continue. She is not Rey, and will have to hurt them with the truth one day. She can’t get too attached to Rey’s life. 

No, it’s much easier to think about Resistance flight techniques, and determining the weaknesses in their ships, and preparing herself for war the way she always does than that. _Get it over with, _she tells herself. The longer this persists, the harder it will be to extricate herself. _Once we land on Naboo, end this. _

_Don’t get attached._

She thinks of Kylo. 

He’d never be put in this situation—it would be too intense for him, being tasked with killing his mother. That was why Snoke had given it to her and not him. But _he_ wouldn’t get attached. He wouldn’t be so weak as to do that. 

**Kylo**

Rey is silent for the rest of their stay on the tiny asteroid.

Whatever it was that she’d said to her mother when she’d gone back outside, she doesn’t share with Kylo. 

Of course he knows she went out there. She’d tried to do something with the Force that hadn’t worked, but it was enough for him to know that he shouldn’t follow her. _She’ll need to confront it, _he told himself as he’d drunk his water. _She doesn’t know how to let go._

Neither does Ben.

Something was different about her when she came back with a container of bacta, that she’d begun applying to his face and something frozen to press against his ribs as they sat there, waiting for their food and drink before helping him hobble back to the fully fueled ship. It had helped, some. It still hurt a lot, but he’d always been able to handle pain well. It made him stronger—he knew this. He had learned this from his master. And especially as they grew closer and closer to Luke, it would help strengthen him in his resolve. 

She didn’t say a single word.

Kira always had her quiets. She was used to processing her needs silently, without help. Sometimes, she’d do it around Kylo when she needed to, but otherwise, she reminded him of a cat: fully contained in herself.

Rey’s emotions swing violently back and forth as they take to the skies. She doesn’t look back once to see if she catches another glimpse of her mother. She doesn’t mention her, she doesn’t even cry. But Kylo senses rage in her, then despair, then bitterness, then hope, then rage again. 

He leaves her in the cockpit for a while to continue to put bacta on himself. Give her some space. If she’s like Kira, she’ll appreciate that, rather than have someone hovering over her like a nursemaid.

Like a mother.

But Rey follows him back a few minutes later, crouching down next to him and pressing her hand against his chest and a moment later he feels her Force signature stretching into him as she tries to knit more of his broken ribs back together.

“Stop that.”

“You’re still—”

“I said you’re going to tap yourself out.”

“I rested,” she snaps.

“Not enough,” he replies. “I’ll be fine for a little while longer. Get some sleep, then we can try again.”

“Stop telling me what to do!” she flares, leaping to her feet. “If I want to help you, let me help you!”

“Not at your own expense,” he snarls back. “Not if it taps you out. I’m trying to protect you from yourself.”

“You’d be the first,” she says and she’s crying again, her shoulder shaking. She whirls around so he can’t see her face, one hand pressed to her eyes and Kylo reaches slowly for the hand that’s hanging limply at her side.

“You’re not alone,” he tells her quietly.

“I’ve been alone since I was _six_,” she sobs. “Of course I’m alone.”

“You’re not,” he says. “You’re not what she left you to become. You’re not what they thought you were. You’re not weak, or stupid, or—or—”

He fumbles.

He doesn’t know what her mother had told her. He can guess, but he doesn’t know. She hasn’t pulled her hand from his. 

“She wanted me to kill her,” Rey whispers. “She said she killed my father for him. She said she wanted me to do it too, that I was weak for not doing it.” Kylo swallows, trying to think of what to say. Grappling with weakness—that he’s familiar with. But he cannot even begin to fathom what it must be like to have your mother ask you to kill her. All his mother had ever done was lie to him and make him feel like he mattered less than the whole damned Republic. But she’d never ask him to kill her. “If she’d asked me anything else—to help her, to take her with me—I would have in a heartbeat. But she didn’t want that from me. She didn’t want anything from me. I just left her there, I just—”

Rey’s voice cracks and he pulls her hand then and she sits down on the edge of the bunk next to him and he pulls her into a hug. He doesn’t know what to say, and he’s not much of a hugger but somehow instinct tells him this will help.

It seems to.

He feels her breathing start to steady, feels her heart start to beat faster, feels the sadness flicker with confusion because—

She’s glad to be in his arms.

He’s never hugged Kira. Kira’s not a hugger. He doesn’t have a point of comparison.

And he finds he doesn’t want one.

The only person he’s ever held in his arms is Rey, and it feels more centering than anything. It doesn’t matter that his body aches, that her whole existence seems to be in agony. What matters is her back is pressed to his chest, her heart pumping through her ribs against his heart pumping through his ribs. 

“That was the right thing to do,” he whispers to her. He doesn’t need to speak loudly with her ears this close to his mouth. “You did the right thing. Killing her in anger wouldn’t have undone the pain.”

“I know,” Rey whispers. “That’s why I didn’t do it. You were right. I needed to let it go. But now I’m afraid I can’t. What if I’m too weak to and—”

“You’re not weak,” he repeats firmly. “And it’s not easy, letting the past go.”

“You did,” Rey says. “You and Kira both.”

_Did we?_

Because he’s not so sure anymore.

_I’ll know when I see his face, _he tells himself. _I won’t wonder, I won’t question. I won’t hesitate._

It feels like he’s whining to himself.

“What do we tell Kira?” Rey mumbles at long last. Her eyes are bloodshot—a sharp contrast to the hazel. 

And Kylo’s mind goes blank.

He can imagine Kira now. _Thank you for telling me, _she would say. _You should have killed her though. _And then she’d disappear. He might see her later with bloodshot eyes, or maybe when sparring there’d be a particular viciousness. She would hide her agony, but she’d be in agony.

“Do we have to tell Kira?” he hears himself asking and Rey looks up at him. 

“Yes,” she says. “Don’t we? Wouldn’t she want to know? Doesn’t she deserve to know?”

_I deserved to know! _he had screamed at his uncle, screamed until his throat was raw. They’d been in the woods, away from the rest of Luke’s students—all of whom are looking at him like he’s cursed now. _Darth Vader’s grandson? There was always something off about him. _

His mother had never told him.

Suddenly he’s glad that Rey’s in his arms, that he has someone to cling to because—because—

“If it protects her?” he hears himself say from far away, but he doesn’t believe it.

Kira’s a liar, keeps herself safe in all her lies, but she’s never been lied _to_. He’s never lied to her. He couldn’t do that. He shouldn’t want to do that. Even if Rey’s shuddering and crying in his arms, she’d deserved to know too, right? Deserved to know what had made her suffer so, to get that little bit of insight, that little bit of piece. 

His mother had always been so nervous at his outbursts. He’d thought that she’d been looking for hints of Vader after he found out. But what if she was afraid of hurting him, seeing how hurt he was when she—when his dad—

_She was wrong, _he snarls at the memories. _She shouldn’t have done that. _If _that’s what she was doing._

His mother is a liar.

Like Kira.

And he can’t bring himself to lie to Kira. 

He can’t bring himself to lie to Rey, either.

Rey, who is in his arms right now, letting him comfort her, not having any fucking clue how much of a comfort she is to him right now. If Rey doesn’t think he’s a monster anymore, does that mean maybe he isn’t one? That maybe Snoke had been wrong and that wasn’t the only path for him left when his uncle had tried to kill him?

_No, _he protests, but even then it feels weak. Weak. Why is he always weak? _Don’t think like that. Don’t question him. He is wise in all matters._

“You’re right,” he says at last. 

“What do we tell her then?” she asks again. 

“I don’t know,” he replies quietly. 

Suddenly he feels like he doesn’t know anything anymore.


	9. Chapter 9

**Rey**

If Rey had thought there was more water on Takodana than could possibly exist in the galaxy, it is nothing compared to the tiny planet that slowly magnifies as they zoom towards it. The surface of the entire thing seems to be water, dotted with tiny islands_. _Land was lost in the sea, quite the opposite of Jakku where water was lost in the ever-swirling sands. 

She swallows.

Thinking of Jakku is different now that she’d met her mother, had left her behind. It had never been a good place, but now anger sears through her every time she thinks about it. _They just left me there. They just left me._

It hurts.

It had always hurt, but it’s like the wound had been ripped open anew and nothing she can do can seal it back up. It doesn’t even give her consolation that this time, she’d left her mother behind. It doesn’t soothe the ache. It doesn’t make it easier.

They land their ship on an island she’s seen before—in a dream, perhaps. In a nightmare?

_You see an island, _Kylo had told her the second time she’d seen him, when she’d been strapped to that rack, when he’d invaded her mind.

It feels like ages ago. It feels like a lifetime ago. He’d seemed haughty and monstrous then. Now—

She can’t read his face as he descends the gangplank. He has no mask to hide behind so he hides his expression as best he can. 

It is raining, something Rey had heard of but had never actually believed could _happen_, and she pauses and tilts her face up to the sky and lets the droplets of water cover her face. She breathes. The air is damp, and cool, and smells of salt and dirt. She wonders briefly what it would have been like to follow those dreams and come here without Kylo.

He hasn’t waited for her when she opens her eyes. She can see him a good twenty yards ahead of her, forging through the rain and she hurries after him, her feet squelching and slipping in the wet earth. 

Her mouth is dry, and nervousness gnaws at her gut. _He’s not going to, _she thinks desperately. _He doesn’t want to be this._

_He’s a monster, _she replies to herself. _You can’t save him from himself. That’s his truth. That’s his nature._

_It’s not._

She refuses to believe that it is.

Or maybe she’s just lying to herself—the way she had for all those years on Jakku, denying the truth that was her family then, denying the truth that is Kylo’s nature now.

But she doesn’t want to give up hope for this too.

**Kylo**

Kylo hates the rain.

It had been raining the day his parents had left him on Yavin with Luke. Drizzling—not like the way it’s pouring now. But raining all the same. Grey days make him remember being pushed aside, discarded, not cared about. 

His gaze is set on the top of the steep hill ahead of him. There’s a rocky outcropping there, on which he senses a man he has not sensed in years. He had sensed him the moment they’d entered the tiny planet’s orbit. It was like coming back to his room and familiar smell of home filling his nose, reminding him that there was a place he existed, that he belonged. Except it wasn’t like that, because he saw the green lightsaber and felt the digging in his mind and his heart lurches, _races_ as his legs move faster and faster.

_You’ll finish it now. You didn’t realize you hadn’t finished it before. Now you’ll finish what you started. Then it will truly be over. Then you’ll truly be free. All the conflict in your heart will go away and you will have given yourself truly to the dark side._

The wind howls in his ears as he marches. Behind him, he hears Rey panting, her feet squelching in the mud behind him. His own feet are probably squelching too, but he doesn’t notice that. It’s as though he’s not inside his own body right now. It’s as though his mind is outside of himself, up that hill with Luke.

_Don’t hesitate, _he tells himself to a rhythm in time with his moving feet. _Don’t hesitate. Don’t hesitate. Don’t—_

Luke doesn’t even turn to face him when he reaches the top of the hill. He stares out over the stormy water. Lightning crackles to illuminate the sea and Kylo stands there, breathing as though he’s been running for days.

_I’ve been running for years._

_Not anymore._

“Are you going to turn and face me?” Kylo asks. His voice does not crack. 

“What will I see, Ben?”

“Destiny.”

Luke sighs. “I saw that long ago.”

And fury flares in him, but his rage is inarticulate. Words fail him. He just stares at his uncle, breathing hard, seeing red.

His uncle is still talking. “Futuresight turns us all to fools. Jedi Master Brendle said that long ago.”

“So now you’re going to lecture me?” He’d laugh, but he doesn’t find it funny at all.

“No, Ben. I’m not.” Luke sighs and turns. “Are you still afraid of me?”

“I’m not afraid,” Ben replies automatically.

“You have every right to be,” Luke tells him. “I tried to kill you, not save you. Did I turn you into the monster I saw in your destiny? Did futuresight play me for a fool?”

“I am everything I have made myself,” Kylo says, his hand tightening into a fist. They’re standing at the edge of a cliff. His master had thrown him over one once, to help him excise his own weakness. “And nothing of what you made me.”

Luke gives him a searching look, his wide blue eyes darting between each of Kylo’s for a long moment. Surprisingly, there’s no curl of his uncle’s Force signature in the air around him. There’s nothing at all. 

Luke sighs.

“Yes,” he says. “Yes, I see that now. So have you come to end me?”

“I—” Kylo begins and behind him—

A drop of water hits a blade of grass before ricocheting sideways towards the dirt below.

The wind blows slightly against him from the left, sending a shiver through him.

Rey holds her breath.

Rey hadn’t killed her mother.

“The Supreme Leader wants you,” he hears himself say as if from far away. “You’re coming with me. It will be better if you don’t resist.”

Surprise flickers on Luke’s face for just a moment. “Very well,” he replies. 

And he strolls past Kylo, past Rey, down the hill.

Kylo stares where his uncle had been standing.

His lightsaber is still on his hip.

He hadn’t even ignited it.

He could still do it, could charge after him, cut him down.

He had hesitated.

And his hesitation had gotten the better of him.

_Weak_, he berates himself. _Weak, foolish, heartstrong boy. Unworthy of—_

Rey’s hand is on his arm and when he looks at her, it’s like there are stars on her face, reflected in all the raindrops that have landed there. The lightning behind them brightens her eyes as she looks up at him. Her full lips have quirked up into a small smile and it doesn’t matter that the sea and sky are roiling around him, everything feels still.

Still, and calm, and proud.

She’s proud of him.

When has anyone ever looked on him with pride? In Snoke’s pride, there had always been a hunger, and Kira had never looked proud of him for all her partnership. This—

He swallows.

Rey rests a hand on his arm and together they turn to look down the hill. Luke’s ahead of them, rigidly refusing to look back.

Dazedly, Kylo begins to move.

**Rey**

“I always wondered had happened to you,” are the first words that Luke Skywalker says to her when they’re both sitting in the back of the ship. Kylo is piloting them up to the stars and Rey had decided that she’d give him what little space she could on the ship. “I didn’t find you among the dead and I didn’t know if you’d ran or helped him.” Rey’s lips part in surprise. “So I can’t say I’m surprised. Just disappointed.”

It takes Rey a moment to decide what to say. 

“I’m Rey. And it’s a pleasure to meet you, Master Skywalker.”

Luke blinks at her once, then tilts his head, then leans it back, his eyes going distant as though he’s remembering the memory of a memory.

“Rey,” he says slowly. Then he lets out a huff of laughter. “I always thought she made you up. She always was a liar. First you were her sister, then you were her clone, then you weren’t at all.” Rey’s mouth twitches to hide a grimace—one more reminder of the truth she hadn’t let herself believe, let herself acknowledge. His gaze sharpens and he assesses her now. “How’d they find you, then? I assume Kira’s somewhere.”

“He kidnapped me on Takodana,” she replies evenly. “I was there with Han Solo and my friend Finn.” Luke Skywalker wouldn’t know Finn, but he does sit up a little straighter at the mention of Han’s name. “He brought me to Snoke and interrogated me and—”

“And you chose his side?”

“No,” Rey says carefully. She’s acutely aware that there’s no door between here and the cockpit. Is Kylo listening? Or is he still in that daze he’s been in since the hilltop? She suspects he is, given how close to catatonic she’d been after seeing her mother, but it wouldn’t be the same. Maybe he’s shaken it off more quickly than she’d been able to. She at least had this to distract her where he wouldn’t have anything at all. “No—I didn’t.”

“Then why are you here?”

“I tried to run,” she says. “I thought he was a monster—for what he did to me. For what he’s a part of.”

“But?” Luke prompts her, sensing the turn that she’s trying to decide how to articulate. 

And then she realizes that Luke’s already done it for her. 

“There’s conflict in him,” she says slowly. “He doesn’t want to admit it, but there is. Maybe futuresight did play you for a fool. Maybe you thought that he’d made his choice when he hadn’t, and pushed him towards the one he didn’t want.”

“How do you know he doesn’t want it?” Luke snorts. 

“Because Snoke ordered him to kill you, not to capture you,” Rey says and Luke freezes. “Because he saved my life despite my having tried to get him killed. Because he cares about my sister and wants to keep her safe. Those don’t strike me as the actions of a monster.”

“He killed my students. Some of them barely more than children,” Luke growls.

“He did,” Rey says because how many times had Kylo thrown that in her face too when trying to prove himself a monster. She remembers the deadened way he’d talked about it, the hollowness in his voice, the emptiness in his eyes. “And maybe it’s something he’ll never be able to overcome or move past and he’ll have to grapple with it for the rest of his life. But there’s no changing the past.” She catches a lump in her throat. “No matter how unjust it’s been. There’s only forging ahead.”

“Am I wrong to want justice for my students?” Luke asks her, but something about the way his voice turns as he says it keeps Rey from getting annoyed, from feeling as though he hadn’t heard her. No—it sounds like he’s asking her opinion, as though he needs to know, as though he questions it in himself. _Did I turn you into the monster I saw in your destiny?_

“Do you blame yourself?” she asks quietly as she dares. “What justice do you seek? Because if you pushed him to the wrong choice, isn’t it your responsibility to those who died to help him unmake that choice?”

“And how do I help him?” Luke whispers. “He doesn’t want my help.”

Rey glances down thin hallway to the cockpit. “You wait,” she says quietly. “You let him decide. He only just started deciding for himself. Trust him.”

She swallows.

When had she started trusting him?

Her mother? Or before then? She hadn’t left him to die on that planet where they’d been ambushed but this feels different from that. That had been not wanting him to die. This is wanting him to live, to be what he wants to be for the first time in his life. He'd held her in his arms and it had been comforting and it _shouldn’t_ have been. But it was.

Luke is watching her closely, an odd expression she can’t quite parse on his face.

“You’ve never had a teacher, have you?”

Rey blinks at him. Kylo had taught her to heal, but only because it had been truly necessary after he’d been so badly beaten. But she’d refused at every stage of the way—first because he’d been a monster, then because…well she didn’t know why. She didn’t really want him to teach her. That wasn’t what she wanted from him.

“No,” she says. “I’ve taught myself for the most part. Kylo tried teaching me, but I wouldn’t let him until he needed healing.”

“You can heal?” Luke asks her sharply.

“Yes,” Rey says, blinking back at him.

Luke hums for a moment. “Of course you’d have the same raw power that she does. That makes sense. Leia is strong too, even if she was never interested in completing her training.” He leans forward. “Would you like to learn?”

Rey’s mouth goes dry.

Luke Skywalker is offering to teach her how to use the Force.

This is better than any imaginary future she’d dreamed for herself on Jakku. Most of those had revolved around her parents, and what a painful disappointment that had ultimately been. And sure, he wasn’t the same Luke Skywalker she’d grown up hearing about, he was older, and more bitter, and had tried to kill his nephew, but _Luke Skywalker_…

She smiles at him, blinking the prickles out of her eyes. And Luke nods to her. 

**Kira**

They pull out of hyperspace when they reach Naboo’s orbit. Kira stares at the little blue planet, so small and innocent looking in the stars in front of her.

“That’s it?” she asks Finn.

He nods. “Yeah, I think so. Looks to be pretty green, doesn’t it?”

Kira nods. It’s an innocuous comment, before she remembers that Rey wouldn’t have seen a lot of green on Jakku. She takes Finn’s hand and he squeezes it. She wishes him squeezing her hand was comforting and not confusing. She wishes that it didn’t make her feel guilty and confused. She’s not supposed to feel guilty or confused. She’s a weapon, a warrior. Finn makes her feel like a person.

“All hands on deck,” Poe calls. “Finn, with me. Rey, to your ship.”

She gives Finn a quick kiss on the cheek before heading to her X-Wing, donning Red Five’s helmet and climbing up into the cockpit. She takes to the stars, following the Red Leader’s command before turning off her comlink and setting up her scrambler.

A moment later, there’s a holo of Veesh Ren in the cockpit with her.

“We’re landing on Naboo,” she tells him without preamble.

“Good,” he says. “I was starting to worry you’d abandoned us.”

“I can’t message you from hyperspace,” she replies. “You know that.” The tech they'd given her isn’t elegant enough for that. 

Veesh shrugs. “As you say. And soon you will take care of Organa?”

“Soon,” she says again, wishing her voice hadn’t quite broken over that word the way it had.

“What’s this? Second thoughts?”

“Dry throat,” Kira replies. 

Veesh hums, his head tilting back a little back under his helmet. 

“I trust the next time I hear from you, it will be to confirm the mission,” he says slowly.

“Unless Kylo is back and I report it to him and not you,” she replies acidly. She _hates_ reporting into Veesh. Kylo giving orders feels natural to her—Ben Solo had been a part of her life for so long, a big brother helping her through life, correcting her training, making her better, trusting her. Veesh is micromanaging.

_And not even wrongfully so—you don’t want to kill Organa, _a traitor voice that sounds like Rey, pleading, _come back_, in her mind whispers.

“Yes, unless Kylo is back,” agrees Veesh. “Assuming he is also able to complete his mission as the Supreme Leader has commanded him and isn’t getting cold feet too.”

“You can leave your editorializing out of this,” Kira snaps. “I know how to do my job.”

“Do you? Then do it.”

She kills the call in frustration once again, more than a little bit plotting how to get him kicked out of the Knights of Ren once she and Kylo have returned from their various missions. She somehow doubts that Kylo would take very kindly to his efficacy and loyalty being questioned.

No better than Kira’s taking it now.

_If there weren’t something to worry about, you wouldn’t be getting upset, _the interrogator in her whispers. How many men has she interrogated, dug into the very hearts and minds of to find this sort of weakness, this whisper of temptation. 

“I will not bend,” she says aloud and turns the Resistance comlink back on.

The Squadrons are joking around. 

“No wonder Vader fell in love with a Senator from this planet. After all that sand, the lakes of Naboo must have been _heaven_,” sighs Jessika Pava. 

“Sure, must have loved how wet her lakes were,” guffaws Snap, which earns him a few disgusted sounds as well as a few appreciative laughs.

“Hey Rey, be careful—you might fall in love with the water if you’re not careful and turn to the dark side,” Oddy chuckles.

“As if I couldn’t drink an entire lake down after one afternoon on Jakku. I’m never leaving this place,” she says. Yavin IV had been humid, hot—a jungle. She had hated the damp air quite as much as she’d hated the dry on Jakku. Something tells her Naboo will be pristine, soft on her skin, warm on her heart, exactly the sort of place she’d like to actually spend some time if she were left to her own devices. 

_Do it,_ Veesh had ordered her.

She won’t be on Naboo for very long.

Her hands tighten, briefly, on her controls, and suddenly she feels very, very tired.


	10. Chapter 10

**Kira**

“The catacombs go on for miles,” Vice Admiral Holdo is saying and Kira’s eyes snap around, taking in the thick stone walls on all sides. They are beneath the cliff edge of Naboo’s capital, the heart beneath the palace. There’s death in these walls—she can feel it. But there is also brightness—a duel of light and dark. “So be careful to stick to our quadrant. Senator Naberrie has ensured that we are being kept secret here, and the last thing we want is for word to get out that we’re being kept right under the Queen’s palace.”

_Yeah, that’d be bad, _Kira thinks dryly. Veesh would want to know, but that makes her loath to actually tell him. 

_Do it._

She keeps looking around. The ceilings are high arched. The stone is smooth, polished. There’s an austerity even this deep beneath the city.

Senator Naberrie steps forward from where she’s standing beside General Organa. _They look alike, _Kira thinks darkly. She remembers, ages ago, Ben telling her about how his grandmother had died giving birth to his mother and uncle, and how one of her dearest friends had adopted his mother. The Senator must be the General’s cousin, then, and shares her deep brown eyes, the dark hair that’s going grey, and the curve of her lips and chin. “My aunt,” she says, “would like the symbolism of the Resistance finding safe keeping here. She fought hard against the Empire, against those who would restrict the freedoms this Galaxy has to offer, both when she served as queen in this very palace and when she served as Senator.” She nods her head at Leia. “She would be proud of all of you and what you are doing in the service of freedom and democracy. Her legacy lives on in you.”

Kira frowns.

“What does that mean?” she asks Finn quietly, but Finn shrugs. He doesn’t know either. She glances at Rose, but Rose shakes her head too. 

Kira searches her memories. Ben had only mentioned his grandmother—his mother’s true mother—that one time, or maybe twice, but only in the story of how he had been raised knowing Alderaan’s traditions, why he had always toyed random threads into braids and why sometimes he looked at the stars overhead, his eyes searching the bright blue orb, light years away and so far that it’s light had not yet disappeared from Yavin’s sky, despite the homeworld being destroyed. _Did he ever look for Naboo too?_

But nothing about some legacy of freedom. She just remembers tense shoulders the day he’d learned—alongside the rest of them—that Darth Vader was his grandfather.

_How could someone who loved freedom and democracy fall in love with Darth Vader?_

She stares at General Organa. Even more of Ben’s confusion, his anger, his pain, falls into place. _Why did you lie to him? Why?_

The meeting disperses, and Kira hovers, pretending to continue her investigation of the smooth marble as she listens to Pooja Naberrie, Leia Organa, and Amilyn Holdo plan.

“Out of sight, out of mind,” Pooja says. “I can keep the queen distracted. She need never know, and being able to plead ignorance—”

“Won’t stop Snoke,” Leia says. “He’s cruel and harsh. If he finds out, Naboo may go the same way as the Hosnian system.” She sounds so sad, guilty, as she says it.

“I doubt that,” Pooja shrugs. “Don’t forget—his idol hailed from Naboo. Palpatine was a Senator of Naboo before he was Chancellor, before he was Emperor. He and Padmé were _friends_.”

Kira fights a frown. 

“There aren’t people who still support him here, though,” Leia replies, her voice steely. “That statue of him is gone from the main square of Theed.”

“Oh,” Pooja replies darkly, “I don’t think it’s possible to ever fully rout Palpatine. There are _definitely_ the weak minded, the gluttonous for power who think he had the right of it, who won’t say no to a leader who styles himself after him. No—I think Snoke will keep us around if only because we’re his home system too.” 

Kira’s head is spinning now. _How didn’t I know any of this?_

Because the Emperor had died before she was born, because no one had thought to mention that Darth Vader’s wife had come from the same planet, had served as Senator likely at the same time that the Emperor was consolidating his empire. _That explains how Darth Vader met her at least._

But not how they fell in love. 

_Why does it matter? _The voice sounds like Veesh’s. _Are you looking for excuses not to kill her daughter? Destroy her dream? Are you so weak-willed and naive that you would fall into the Resistance’s arms at the mention of one dead idealist?_

“All the same,” Vice Admiral Holdo says, “It’s probably best that we—”

“Keep a low profile. The fewer people know you’re here, the better. Even if you did destroy that superstar—”

“Starkiller Base,” Kira hears herself say before she can stop herself. Just _how_ many times had Hux corrected everyone about what it was called?

The three women turn to look at her.

“Pooja,” General Organa says, “This is Rey.”

“A pleasure,” says Pooja Naberrie, though she looks mildly confused.

Leia steps towards her, and Holdo takes Pooja’s arm. “Those power generators you were talking about…” and the two other women leave Leia behind with Kira.

_Do it._

“Did your son know about his grandmother?” she asks. “Or did you keep her from him, like Vader?”

Whatever Leia Organa had been expecting, it wasn’t that.

“He knew about her,” she says at last, that tone of sorrow back in her voice. “He never expressed that much interest in her. He knew she helped form the Rebellion, knew that she died protecting me and Luke, but he was always much more enamored of the Force than of politics.” That much, at least, sounded like Ben. “But he knew about her. He knows about her,” she corrects. She heaves a sigh. 

“Why don’t more people know about her?” she asks. “That she married Vader, that she—”

“—loved him? Because Carise Sindian wanted to destroy me, not the legacy of some forgotten Senator. I am the threat to what he wanted. My mother’s just a ghost.” 

“Why did she love him?” Kira asks at last. _Why do you need to know? _Veesh’s voice asks lazily. _Do it._

“I don’t know,” Leia replies. “I’ve never known. I’ve never understood it. He was a monster and she…” She looks up at the archways around her. “She died defying him. That’s what my father—my _real_ father—always told me. I don’t know what that means. I wasn’t there. But she refused to bend to him in the end. I don’t know if that means it was love or hatred, in the end. A form of love, I suppose, not to break to the will of someone who’s wrong, no matter how much you care.” 

_She’d rather think her mother loved him than hated him. Why?_

_Because of Kylo?_

The thought wrenches her heart.

She doesn’t say anything for a long while, just watching the General. The General watches her. 

“Go on,” she says after a while. “Ask it. It’s all right.” There is no fear in her voice. There is no anger, or defiance. There’s only peace.

“Your son—he’s Kylo Ren?”

The words hang in the air between them, deep beneath the castle her mother had once ruled from.

Leia Organa does not blink as she nods. “And I love him. And I wish he’d come home to me.”

_Come back! _Rey had screamed after their departing ship.

Kira wants to scream herself, wants to send her fist into the marble right next to her.

Instead she nods once to the General and excuses herself, her hand balled into a fist.

**Kylo**

Kylo can’t call it an abnormal foreboding that fills him as he guides the ship into yet another uncharted port for refueling. He’s been feeling foreboding ever since they had taken Luke aboard their ship on Ahch-To. 

He hadn’t slept well. He’d given his uncle his bunk—something he didn’t deserve, and he had been trying to alternate sleeping times on the one that Rey had laid claim to, but he finds it hard to sleep when his uncle’s around. 

It makes sense, given the last time he’d woken under his uncle’s gaze.

He feels as though he’s constantly hot and cold and does his best to focus on flying, the in and out of hyperspace that’s required in the Unknown Regions because you don’t know where the asteroids and planets are. Everything moves differently out here. When they’re back in the charted galaxy, he’ll be able to use hyperspace lanes and then, he’ll be able to put these stars behind him.

_Snoke will want you to kill him, _he thinks in the fresher, trying to ignore the sting of frustration that is Luke teaching Rey. She'd let him start teaching her almost at once, without a moment’s hesitation. Because of course—if _Luke Skywalker _wanted to train her, it doesn’t matter that he’d tried to murder his own nephew. 

Snoke would be disappointed in him. He should kill Skywalker, and the girl for good measure, since she clearly is picking Skywalker over him.

But he can’t. It’s not even because she looks like Kira that he couldn’t bear the thought of her dead. It’s that look of pride she’d given him while he’d been in the rain, too cowardly to kill his uncle.

_You aren’t who you want to be, _she’d told him how many times?

_And what if I’m not who you want me to be either? _he thinks angrily. He doesn’t want to see disappointment in Rey’s eyes.

Damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t—that’s what it always is, isn’t it? Snoke’s disappointment or Rey’s? Why does he care more about what a girl he’d found in the woods than thinks of him than his master?

A coward. A waste of training and space.

And his uncle is on this ship now, instead of safely dead, and he feels like he’s been caught in some sort of trap. Between him and Rey…

But no. It wasn’t a trap. Rey was brutal, and stern, and warm, and determined, but she was a truly terrible liar and to catch someone in a trap you need to be a good liar.

_She actually believes in you._

_Like Kira._

Kira, who would call him a fool for letting Skywalker live.

_You hesitated, _he berates himself. _Deal with the consequences._

And those consequences are that foreboding doesn’t feel out of place for him as he steers the ship to land on this planet.

“Should we go out there?” Rey asks as they land. “Luke could—”

“They’ll recognize the ship,” Kylo says. “More than our faces, or anything else.”

“Unless I stole it from you,” Luke adds mildly.

“You’re not leaving my sight,” Kylo spits.

“Suit yourself,” Luke shrugs. “What are you even concerned about?”

Kylo glances at Rey.

“We might have gotten into a spot of trouble with…I don’t even know who,” Rey says vaguely. 

Luke hums. “I travelled with Han Solo. You don’t have to say more.”

Kylo’s hand tightens on the controls.

“This isn’t like that,” he growls.

“Isn’t it?”

He hates him. He hates him so much. _Channel that hatred, and strike him down, _he can hear Snoke whisper.

He wonders if his uncle can tell he’s considering it.

_Did I turn you into the monster I saw in your destiny?_

Why does everyone act as though he cannot have made his own choices? Even his reaction to Luke wanting him dead—is that Luke’s too, now?

“It doesn’t matter,” Rey says after a pause, and Ben’s attention lands on her. “What matters far more is that we might be in trouble if they see your face,” she says to Kylo. He can tell she’s trying to refocus the conversation. He can’t tell if it makes him angry or not. 

“You think I can’t take them if I’m prepared? They got the jump on me twice, but I’m not weak,” he grumbles at her.

“I don’t think you’re weak,” she says, “But I also don’t think anyone should have to die. Not more than they already have.” 

“And who’s fault is that?” Kylo asks before he can stop herself and Rey’s eyes flash frustration at him so quickly that he continues before she can cut him off. “Fine,” he says. “Go on then,” to his uncle. “But if you try and sell us out, or—or—”

Luke’s gaze on him is steady, he tastes tin in his mouth. _This is a mistake, _he thinks to himself. He doesn’t—ever—want to let his uncle out of his sight. 

But Luke goes, and Kylo doesn’t say or do anything. _You don’t trust him._

Except—well—

He trusts Luke not to be trustworthy about him. But Rey—Luke wouldn’t do anything to put her in danger. He’s too holier-than-thou for that. He wouldn’t risk Rey’s life.

_I wouldn’t either, _Kylo protests inwardly, as though he thought, for some reason, that he would. Even if he hadn’t promised Kira that he would keep her safe, he has never wanted to harm Rey. 

Which is why he’s sitting in the cockpit, staring out of the viewport, waiting to see what his uncle does because if he does go out there, he _will_ get into trouble. He can feel it.

There is something uneasy in the Force. Something familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.

_Clones_, he thinks again. Why are there so many clones on these forsaken planets? Is it something his master had funded while building the First Order? Palpatine had taken over the republic by creating a clone army—Snoke might have done the same as an homage. He did, after all, build his order on the corpse of Palpatine’s empire.

“Do you feel that?” he asks Rey.

“Hm?”

“That—it doesn’t feel the same as me or Luke. Life that’s…different.” He couldn’t think of another way to say it without it feeling belittling. Veesh was a clone, after all. Veesh was no less a person than Kira, or Rey, or himself, even if he’d been copied and incubated rather than conceived.

Rey looks out over the port. Her eyes land on the masked man that Luke is chatting with. Then she nods.

“Clones,” Kylo says. “That’s what a clone feels like.”

It’s stupid. He knows it’s stupid. But he needs her to think he’s smart, that he knows what he’s talking about, even if she’s gone to his uncle to start learning, after refusing him time and again. _She thinks you’re a monster._

_Does she though? _he wonders, remembering the pride in her eyes on Ahch-To—the whole reason his uncle is still alive. 

He doesn’t know what he is anymore.

He doesn’t feel like Kylo Ren at all, not Snoke’s master of the Knights of Ren, not even a formidable Force User who’d once thought he’d be a Jedi. He feels like a boy again, as nervous as Ben Solo whenever his father had told him he could be anything he wanted to be and he hadn’t been entirely sure he’d believed him.

He watches his uncle.

But even the hate in his heart—which he was relying so intensely on to flare and remind him of who he was, and why he was—seems to have abandoned him.

His uncle looks old.

And short.

And like he’s intrigued by whatever it is he’s talking about with the portmaster. Then—

“We need to hide,” Kylo says sharply, because his uncle is gesturing towards the ship, and he and the portmaster are making their way towards the gangplank.

“_Where_?” she hisses at him but he’s on his feet already.

He’s Han Solo’s son. He knows how to hide on a fucking spaceship.

There’s a storage space just under the main entrance, and with a flick of his fingers, it’s floating in the air.

“Get in,” he hisses to Rey.

“Seems in good working order,” he hears Luke say loudly. “The pair I stole it off of—they seemed to have landed themselves in a good chunk of trouble.”

“There’s not enough space,” Rey retorts quietly but she moves towards the space.

“That doesn’t surprise me,” the portmaster says grimly as Rey drops herself down into the storage hatch. “They crossed Boss Heisly. No one crosses Boss Heisly.”

Kylo slides down above Rey and she’d been right: there’s definitely not enough space. And there’s even less space as, with another flick of his fingers, he lowers the plank back overhead and presses himself down against her.

To his credit, he does his best not to crush her. He can imagine his mother’s face if he’d gone and just thrown his body on top of some unwilling woman, even if that was the extent of what he was doing. 

Rey is lying underneath him, and he’s holding himself up on his arms and knees with just enough space between them that he can’t quite feel the heat of her abdomen.

“First Order,” Luke says overhead and Rey inhales sharply and her chest swells up to meet his and his mind goes blank—completely blank. It’s barely grazing him, but suddenly every part of him is far more aware of Rey beneath him than of Luke and the stranger above him. “But they didn’t put up much of a fight once I got them. If I’d known there was a price on their heads, I’d have dragged them to Boss Heisly myself. Never enough money to go around.”

Right. That’s why he’s in this—why Rey’s—she shifts underneath him. She hasn’t taken a deep breath again but now he knows just how close she—

“He’ll be glad to know they’re without a ship, though. That’ll make them that much easier to find. I’m sure that you’d be compensated for information.”

“Good to know. Where’s he based?”

“Asteroid in quadrant 24-987. Should be the only one in that quadrant at the moment.”

“I’ll head there,” Luke says. “Since this is the first I’m hearing of it—” Luke lowers his voice and Ben can barely hear him ask the next question.

“The man killed his son,” the portmaster replies, grimacing. “The last clone they made of the boy. He died a few years back, and there weren’t quite enough…resources to make more than one of him, not with everything Snoke had been demanding. But he got one last clone of the boy before his genetic matter fully decayed.”

Vividly, Kylo remembers the boy, the look of surprise on his face as he’d cut into him. _A father’s grief._

He wonders if his own father would have hunted down his murderer if Luke had been successful. 

Beneath him, Rey’s hand moves as she covers her mouth, clearly trying to muffle a sad noise. Her hand brushes his chest and all his attention is on her once again. 

“It’s a pity,” the portmaster continues idly. “Once they had enough resources that they could have made a thousand of the boy. They could have made him live forever if they wanted to.”

“Snoke depleted them that much?” Luke asks. “I thought he didn’t have a clone army.”

_He doesn’t, _Kylo thinks, frowning. Although it would not be the first time his master had kept what Kylo didn’t need to know from him. It wasn’t his place to question his master. 

There’s a pause, and Kylo can imagine the portmaster shrugging. 

“He’s the Supreme Leader. He doesn’t have to keep his word.”

“Neither did the Empire,” his uncle says darkly and Kylo tightens his hand into a fist. Naturally his uncle would hate them both, but did he truly think that it was _better_ under the Republic? Places like this would always deal with scum and villainy. There was no honor among thieves. He’d have thought that a life with Han Solo would have taught him that.

Beneath him, he feels Rey’s emotions flicker. Frustration. She doesn’t like the lack of honesty the men are discussing. And it’s only when he catches a glimpse of her eyes in the dark that he realizes that her emotions mirror his own.

What is honor among thieves? What is the word of a Supreme Leader? His master had always told him he’d be better off, but was he? Was the galaxy truly better off under such leadership?

_Do not go questioning your master _now_ just because Luke Skywalker is up there, _he thinks. He can’t afford to go regressing, to engage with any of his uncle’s hypocritical obsession with what was right and good and fair. Nothing was right and good and fair. Not least because Luke Skywalker made it so.

_And so does Snoke._

From a long way off, he remembers voices in his head, the gentle caress that was so much subtler, so much less painful than his uncle’s honest violence, telling him he wasn’t alone, that he could be so much more, that he could have the friends he wanted and not just the untrustworthy girl who told nothing but lies.

Snoke had been more violent with Rey.

Violent out of necessity. Because in his own weakness, he’d taken the girl and not gone on for the droid, because his ambitions were on the line while Kylo Ren…

Wavered.

He hadn’t wanted Starkiller or the destruction of the Hosnian System. He hadn’t—

“They didn’t leave anything behind?” he hears the portmaster ask and it’s all he can do to bring his attention away from Rey’s hand, the way her breathing is tickling at his neck now. 

Unhelpfully he feels blood flowing to his groin.

_Control yourself, _he thinks desperately.

He’s never been good at control.

But if there’s one time that it matters…

He breathes in, and out. In and out. His heart is pounding in his chest and Rey shifts underneath him again, as if trying to hear better.

“That’s everything,” Luke says cheerfully.

“No storage spaces?” the portmaster asks.

“Just this one,” Luke says stamping on the platform just over his head and luckily the sound of his foot hides Rey’s gasp of surprise. “But trust me, you don’t want to look down there. Not unless you want to get on my bad side.” Just the mildest hint of a threat. 

And Ben hears footsteps down the gangplank and he reaches out with the Force. The portmaster and Luke are now by the fuel pump, haggling prices.

He lifts his hand and flicks his fingers and lifts up the platform overhead.

He wishes he could say he stood up gracefully, but he didn’t. He sits back on his knees, his ass brushing against Rey’s shins and it’s like an electric shock went through him and all he can do is sit up straighter and lurch forward, his chest connecting to her face as she tries to sit up. 

After that, he misses the rest, but Rey’s flushing and not looking at him as she climbs up out of the storage space and he hurries back to the cockpit, determined not to show her how red his own face must be right now. His fucking ears feel like they’re on fire.

Luke reappears a few minutes later. “Well, you murdered a kid,” he says dryly and there’s a black rage in his eyes. He, as Kylo had when the boy had died, must be thinking of the bodies he had left behind that night at the Praxeum.

“Yeah, I heard that, thanks,” growls Kylo. He is still thinking about the way the very tip of Rey’s breast had felt against his chest, through several layers of clothing. 

“You really should kick the habit,” Luke says.

“You really think I did it on purpose?” Kylo snaps. “Or would you prefer to remind me at every stage of the way that I’m a massive fuck-up.”

“What are teachers for?”

“You’re not my teacher,” Kylo spits. “You’re nothing.”

Luke looks at him evenly. “No I’m not,” he says quietly. “If I were, you wouldn’t have hurt that much.”

Kylo opens his mouth to say something, to say anything, but he can’t think of any words at all. 

But if he’d been wholly unable to respond to that, his uncle’s next words flatten him. “I failed you, Ben. I’m sorry.”

He stares at his uncle and he feels hot and cold and sees green and feels Rey’s breath against his throat. He feels like his life has all been shrunk down into this chair he’s sitting in and he can’t—he won’t—he doesn’t…

Suddenly, very intensely, he wishes he were asleep again.

Instead, he turns away from his uncle and says, “I should message command, while we’re planetside.”

“Might want to wait until we’re out of range of their sensors,” Luke says. How is it that he sounds gentle? As though he’s trying to—

Kylo gets to his feet and brushes past his uncle. “Fine,” he says. “I’ll wait.”

But as he marches towards the back of the ship, he sees Rey curled up on her side and he can’t help but notice the way her breasts just—

He wants to scream. He wants to punch something, to break something.

He takes a hard right and goes into the fresher, stripping off his clothes and locking the door behind him. He turns on the water and steps under it, so hot that he hisses because his skin is twinging. But it’s something. Some sort of pain he can control, he can ease as he gets used to it and then turns the heat down to a more reasonable temperature.

_I failed you, Ben. I’m sorry._

_I’m sure you are. _He should have snarled that, should have shown his uncle his _triumph_. He served Snoke, Luke’s enemy. Luke was his prisoner. Luke’s life was in _his _hands now.

He doesn’t even realize he’s crying until he tastes salt on his lips.

Much later, when the water is freezing, he gets out of the fresher, feeling more than a little empty.

He doesn’t look towards the back of the ship to see Rey and Luke. He knows they’re both there, talking quietly. He goes to the cockpit and sits and stares at nothing.

Time passes. Luke goes and gets food.

When he returns, the ship is fueled and Kylo punches in his code and takes them to the stars. 

They’re still at the back of the ship, still talking quietly. Learning together, he supposes. 

He prepares to make the jump when he opens up the holo’s connection. 

“Ren.”

It’s not Veesh.

It’s Snoke.

“Master,” Kylo says at once, bowing forward slightly in his seat. “This is a surprise.”

“Yes,” Snoke replies. “It is.”

“Where is Veesh?”

“Veesh Ren has gone to Naboo,” Snoke replies. “Kira Ren is taking too long in her mission and he has…concerns for her capacity. So I sent him to finish the task.”

And Kylo’s heart stops. 

Veesh was one of the knights that Snoke had given him to lead when he’d joined Snoke’s side. That wasn’t what made his heart go cold though. What did was that Veesh, of all his knights, was the one most likely to put his lightsaber through Kira’s back.

“Kira won’t like that,” he says, knowing he’s paused too long.

Because what else can he say? Veesh is lightyears away right now. There’s nothing he can do to stop him, nothing he can do to make him directly disobey the Supreme Leader. _Kira, _he thinks, and everything feels wrong. Surely—surely if she hadn’t—

He can see it now, his mother lying on the floor, blood seeping from her nose. 

He doesn’t want Kira to kill her. He doesn’t want her dead at all.

He never has.

That’s the whole problem. 

“I don’t care what she likes. I want Organa dead, and this charade to be over with. I will be nearby as well to oversee the transition once all is done.”

Kylo holds back a frown. _Transition?_

“And is your mission complete?” Snoke asks.

_Be as good a liar as Kira, _is all that Ben can think. Snoke has dug into his mind from light years away, can read his every thought, his every ambition. He needs to give him no reason to.

“Would I be returning if it weren’t?” he asks dryly.

“Good,” Snoke says. “And the girl—is she learning?”

“She seems willing.”

“Excellent. If her sister has fallen into Organa’s clutches, at least we have a replacement prepared.”

“Yes,” Kylo agrees. 

“Report in once you have reached base. By then I will have new orders for you,” Snoke says and he ends the connection.

Kylo breathes in and out for a long moment. 

He’s got a bad feeling about this, something gnawing in his gut, not letting him have any peace at all.

He changes the ship’s heading

He has to get to Naboo.

**Finn**

“We shouldn’t be doing this,” Finn says not for the first time, and, he is sure, not for the last time either. But neither Rose nor Rey seems to care. 

“Come on,” Rose whispers. “We’re going to be careful.”

“Besides, if the First Order manages to find us, it’ll be good to have scoped the city for the best places to fight back. Tactical research,” Rey adds. 

And who is Finn to defy the combined power of their devious grins. 

There are moments where he still feels like they haven’t talked, like he’s making assumptions, like all this could explode in more tears and misunderstanding. 

And then he sees Rey smile at him and he feels lighter than air and he wonders why he’d want to put words to that feeling because something in the back of his mind tells him that trying to name it would make it lesser, somehow. _You make me feel like I can be or do anything. You make me feel like I’m happy_ somehow, would make him feel less happy, less capable because what if her eyes filled with tears and she ran off again. He wants to bottle her smile and keep it forever. 

And whenever she bites her lower lip, he wants to bite it too.

Theed is sunny, bright, warm—all in good ways. It is so different from Jakku, which seems like a lifetime ago, when he’d thrown himself into the happabore’s drinking water because he’d been so parched. 

Rose drags them to a museum that seems to be dedicated to Padmé Amidala. “So that’s what that meant,” he murmurs to Rey, who gives him a smile that makes his stomach jumble.

“She sounds like an incredible woman,” Rose says wistfully and the lightness in her eyes makes his heart beat a little faster.

_Oh come on, _he tells himself. This just isn’t fair.

Especially since the moment they’re at the restaurant part of the museum, Rey grabs Rose’s hand and drags her towards the food and soon they’re all eating an iced cream sort of thing that has both of them giggling at one another and the way that they smile at each other makes Finn feel as though he’s intruding on something special, something private.

There are fountains everywhere, and gardens, and Rey stops to smell every single flower, her face relaxing into a sort of dreamy smile. Rose finds a lizard creature hiding amongst the plants that she lets climb across her hand until Finn makes her put it back.

But mostly they are smiling and laughing and Finn—Finn is confused.

So very confused. 

They keep smiling at one another, they keep smiling at him, and his heart keeps beating faster and faster and he doesn’t know what to do. It feels like a choice he doesn’t want to make, he shouldn’t have to make. Rey’s kissed him, and he liked it; but Rose’s lips are—well, they’re—and Rey sometimes looks at Rose with the same sort of daze he feels.

“It means so much to see her smile,” Rose whispers to him when Rey disappears for a fresher. “Especially with her sister and everything.”

“Sister?” Finn asks sharply? Rey doesn’t have a family. Not one she’s ever mentioned to him.

“Yeah,” Rose says sadly. “She lost her sister. I couldn’t imagine losing Paige.”

“You won’t lose Paige,” Finn tells her firmly. His heart is aching for Rey. He wants to pull her into his arms, to hold her, to promise her that he’ll never let her be alone again, that if she doesn’t have a family anymore, that doesn’t mean she’ll never have a family, that she’ll be on her own forever. He won’t let that happen. He’ll make her smile every day he can just to prove it to her.

And then there’s a hand in his. 

Rey gives him a soft smile that’s almost a bit sad this time, like she knows what he’s thinking, like she understands, like maybe she wants him to kiss Rose and understands if he doesn’t want to kiss her anymore, but that’s not what he wants—at least—he—

_It’ll be ok, one way or the other, _Rey’s eyes say to him, and he wishes he could believe that. Everything feels wrong. Everything feels like it’s about to fall apart, like it’s too good to be true. Surely peace and happiness like this can’t last. The First Order doesn’t let it last.

**Kira**

They’re making their way towards the entrance to the catacombs behind one of the great waterfalls when she feels it.

She’d recognize it anywhere. 

She’s trained alongside them for how many years now, and Veesh’s Force Signature has always been specific, oddly muted for all its strength. 

She stiffens, her hand still in Finn’s. Finn is spooked, though she doesn’t know why. They’ve had the sort of afternoon that feels like it comes out of someone else’s life, not Kira Ren’s—an afternoon of sunshine and smiles and laughter and heady emotions from all three of them. _It will be all right, _she had tried to convey to him—a promise she couldn’t keep because she’d be gone soon, wouldn’t she? Wouldn’t she?

She looks around, her eyes scanning the square. There’s a farmer’s market happening, berries and fruits from outside the city being bought and sold. No sign of a dark helmet, but she locks eyes with a man across the way.

Clear blue eyes, an aquiline nose, and wavy blond hair.

She doesn’t think she’s ever seen Veesh in person before, but that’s him.

He smiles at her, and inclines his head genially and Kira’s blood runs cold. It takes all her control to hide that feeling from her Force signature.

“Come on,” she tells Finn and Rose.

“What’s the rush?” Rose asks. She’d paused in front of a stall, investigating apples. 

“I think we’ve been gone too long. What if there’ve been updates?”

Finn glances her way, but nods and the three of them hurry through the square.

When they reach the archway that’ll take them to the park that runs along the western side of Theed, Kira glances over her shoulder.

Veesh Ren has disappeared.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Pooja Naberrie](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Pooja_Naberrie)   
[Carise Sindian](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Carise_Sindian)


	11. Chapter 11

**Kylo**

“Snoke’s really leaning into his love of Palpatine if he’s setting up shop on Naboo,” Luke says when they pull out of hyperspace and Kylo grimaces. 

“It’s a pitstop,” he grits out and he can feel his uncle testing his Force Signature. 

“Seems a bit of a specific pitstop,” Luke says carefully. In the second seat of the ship, Rey shifts, leaning forward, trying to catch his face. _What’s going on? _her eyes ask. 

And Kylo takes a deep breath and tries to shut them both out.

He can’t handle either of them reading too much into any of this right now. Both of them will push him too hard and—quite the opposite of thinking it’ll get them what they want, he thinks it might just fragment his mind into a thousand little pieces.

_Kira. Mom. That’s it, _he tells himself in as private a corner of his mind as he dares allow himself. Not that he believes he’ll ever truly have privacy. All that’s a fucking lie, and so what if Luke says he’d failed and he’s sorry, he’d still _done _it. And he’d never in all his life been able to hide anything from his master.

“And how do you propose landing on Naboo with a First Order ship?” Luke asks him, clearly trying not to backseat drive—and thoroughly failing.

“What, you think I don’t have any tricks up my sleeve?” Kylo asks and a moment later, he’s pulling an old frequency he hasn’t thought about in years up and sending a code through.

“That one of Han’s?” Luke asks, sounding—well a little emotional.

_Yeah, don’t read too much into it, _Kylo thinks. Chances are he was about to stumble into one of his dad’s old enemies just as much as one of his dad’s old friends.

Except the voice that comes through the transmission comes through_ much_ too familiarly.

“Milennium Falcon, this is Captain Solo.”

Ben’s fairly certain that if his brain had full control of his body, he’d have shut the comlink down, leapt from his chair, and run to hide in the bunk because the very _last_ thing he’d thought would happen, the last thing he’s equipped to handle is this.

But his brain’s bad at controlling his body—sometimes landing him in awkward situations where he’s destroyed half of a communications room with his lightsaber. In this case, it just leaves him sort of numb and completely voiceless.

_Dad._

He hasn’t seen his father since he was—well—young. Too young. His voice hadn’t even cracked yet, and he still looked up at his dad and had to tilt his head a bit.

“Hi Han,” Luke says into the com.

There’s a pause, and Ben dimly suspects that his dad’s sort of in the same state he’s in right now—wholly unequipped to handle the voice on the other end of the line.

Han Solo recovers faster.

“Good to hear you. Where you been?”

“Atoning,” Luke says. “Listen, we’ve got to land—secretly.”

“You can come to where the Resistance is parked,” Han says and is about to list off details when Luke interjects, “Probably good to land separately from the Resistance. This is a First Order vessel. Wouldn’t want to bring them straight to you.”

Han pauses.

“A First Order vessel? How’d you get a First Order vessel?”

Luke gives him a significant look, a _rip the bacta patch off_ look, a _get it over with_ look. 

Ben clears his voice.

“Hi dad,” he says.

This time, Han Solo actually is wholly incapable of speaking, which Ben really can’t blame him for. Luckily Luke’s done backseat driving and Ben’s too far past caring.

“Any recommendations?”

“Let me get back to you,” Han says. “Won’t be long, but I need to think.”

_Think. Tell mom. Set a trap._

_Dad._

The com goes dead and Ben just sits there staring.

Then he tilts his head back and stares at the ceiling. 

“It’s almost like the Force is trying to tell you something,” his uncle says dryly.

“Shut up,” he grunts.

Of course he had his dad’s luck. He’d had it ever since he’d started on this boneheaded mission. Getting captured and beaten up and now this? Sounds like something out of Han Solo’s day to day, not out of Kylo Ren’s. 

_Well, there’s no going back now, _he thinks. Not if he wants to help Kira—and he does.

Not if he wants to help mom.

“Don’t read too much into it,” he snaps at his uncle at last.

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Luke replies benignly. “But we could go back to the First Order now, if you were concerned about—”

Ben rounds on him, his eyes wide and angry and he has no idea what he’s going to say and to his complete and utter shock, Luke doesn’t continue.

He leans back, holding up his hands and Ben sits there, completely on edge, waiting for his father to reply.

_Dad wouldn’t set a trap for me, would he?_

He doesn’t want to think about that. What sort of monster he might be in order for his father to think he needs to be put down like a wild dog, the way that Luke had that stormy night on Yavin IV.

Especially when all he’s felt—basically from the moment he’d learned of Rey’s existence—was the pull to the light.

_Just let go, _he thinks to himself. 

What would it be like, to come home, to have his father smile and his mother hug him? 

But he’s the Jedi Killer.

There’s no such thing a happy homecoming.

He swallows.

He takes a deep breath.

He hardens his heart.

“Thirty clicks due north of Theed,” Han Solo’s voice crackles across the frequency.

“Got it,” Kylo says and disconnects. 

“Thirty clicks due north,” Rey says quietly. “We don’t know how close or far that’s going to be. That’s a long way to walk.”

“We’ll have to hope Han remembers to bring the speeders,” Luke says. 

**Rey**

Kylo is definitely avoiding her eyes as they fly north of Theed, wherever Theed is.

She lets him.

She can feel the light coming back to him—she knows that it is. He hadn’t killed Luke and he’d gotten so quiet when he’d heard Han Solo’s voice.

“What’s your plan?” Luke asks him.

“Remember how you’re my prisoner?” Kylo replies sharply.

“Fine, I’ll let you handle how you explain what’s going on to your father, then,” Luke says, shrugging. “I’m just trying to help.”

“And I don’t need your help,” Kylo snarls.

“Yes you do,” Luke says. “Everyone needs help. Especially at a time like this.”

“Switch off,” Kylo mutters. And then, because he doesn’t seem to be able to help himself, “I suppose it’s occurred to you that you might actually be doing your whole cause a disservice by keeping on prodding me, right? If you want to _save my soul_ or whatever, maybe annoying me back to the dark will be counterproductive.”

The jab is one that’s clearly not supposed to be taken too seriously, but Rey can’t help but look at look. _Save his soul. _

_There is conflict within him._

Luke takes a deep breath. “Ben, it shouldn’t be your pride that keeps you from doing what you know is right.”

“How about my sense of self-preservation then?” Kylo snarls at him.

Luke’s eyes go a little dark.

“I will always regret it,” Luke says quietly. “I pushed you to the dark then.”

“And you’re doing it now, too. Congratulations Uncle Luke. Now will you shut up?”

Luke does him one better. He goes to the back of the ship. Rey keeps watching Kylo.

“Ben,” she whispers. He glances at her, his eyes soft, afraid. She’s never called him Ben before and in that moment, silently, they both acknowledge that. He doesn’t look away. “It’ll be all right. I know it will be.”

“You don’t,” he says firmly. “You don’t know if this is all futile, if Snoke is just preparing his final stroke to crush the Resistance for good.”

“And isn’t it worth fighting that which would destroy us?” she asks.

He leans back as though she’d slapped him. “As if I haven’t been doing just that.”

“That’s not what I meant—Ben—”

“Ben Solo is gone,” he says and he turns his head to face the front viewport. “Stop holding on to the waste of a dream, Rey. I’d have thought you’d have learned your lesson about that.”

She takes a deep breath, then another. Her throat is tight, and she’s blinking back tears. Why would he say that? Why would he—he’d been there, he’d seen what it had been? Why would he use it against her? She doesn’t understand, she doesn’t—this—

“It’s your family,” she pleads. “Your father and mother. Don’t they—”

“You want yours back so much?” he demands, rounding on her again, the plan not to look at her at all clearly forgotten. His words sting worse than a slap, wind her more than a punchto the stomach. “Kira. Find Kira—she’ll care about you far more than your mother, than my parents. I told you—Han Solo would have disappointed you as a father.”

But his anger only makes her more determined. “And yet you reacted so strongly when you heard his voice.” _As strongly as when I heard my own mother’s voice after all those years?_ “Ben—I felt it. I know there’s conflict within you.”

“Stop it. Just stop it.”

“Why are we even here then?” Rey demands angrily. “What’s the point of even being here if you’re just going to turn your back on all of them? I thought the plan was to kill your uncle and return to Snoke but here we are.”

“I’m here to save your sister,” Kylo snarls. “Because she’s the only family that matters to me.”

Something twitches in his face, the corner of his mouth, his jaw. Like he is trying to convince himself of that.

And Rey pounces. “You’re just saying that. I know you are, Ben. But you’re trying to convince me so you can convince yourself, but that’s not how this works—that’s not how any of this works.”

“Oh, you’re one to talk,” he tries again but Rey cuts him off.

“Exactly. I am. I’m the _queen_ of trying to convince myself of a truth that’s not there at all. So perhaps you should listen to me and confront _your_ painful truth. Luke’s right—you _know_ what’s right. You just don’t want to face it because it hurts you. You can’t change the past that’s hurt you, but you can change what you do to let the future hurt you. And I think you’re letting it—”

He changes the angle of the ship, descending it down into the field below. There’s no coverage at all—no trees, no nothing. It’s great, sweeping green plains. 

The moment the ship lands, he gets up, drops the gangplank and descends, closing the ship up on her and Luke.

_I’m right, _she thinks at him, watching as he stands there in front of the ship, his back erect, his neck and shoulders stiff. _You know I’m right._

_So are you a coward, Ben Solo? Or are you brave?_

**Kylo**

Kylo waits, staring southward towards Theed.

He doesn’t have a cloak, or a helmet. He’s wearing an undershirt because he’d stopped bothering putting on his vest at some point a few days before. 

He takes several deep breaths. It has rained recently. The dirt is wet and smells of spring. And as he reaches out through the Force he senses it—a transport, zipping its way towards where he had landed in a wide open field.

His father is on that transport, and Chewie. But not his mother. Just the two of them.

He opens his eyes again when they are close enough to see across the green. On the ship behind him, he senses Luke and Rey both stirring, both going to the cockpit to watch. 

_Come on, _he thinks, though he’s not sure at whom. _Come on. Come on. Come on._

The transport gets closer and closer and closer.

And then it stops, twenty feet from where he’s standing. It disengages, and the doors open and his father steps off.

His father is short and stooped. His hair is graying, and there’s a pudge to his middle that’s frankly disconcerting. In his mind’s eye, Han Solo was ever young, and strong, and tall, but he’s none of those things. He’s just a man, like Luke.

“Ben,” his father says and he takes a step forward.

“Han Solo,” he responds. In the light of day, he can see every wrinkle on his father’s face. “I didn’t expect to meet you here.”

“Gotta say the same, kid,” Han replies. “What’s got you sneaking onto Naboo? And where’s Luke?”

“Luke Skywalker is my prisoner.”

He half expects his father to laugh, but he doesn’t. He just nods. Somehow that’s worse. “What do you want?” he repeats. 

_Danger, _he thinks, but it sounds too melodramatic. _I want to save Kira Ren, the one you think is Rey, blow her cover, destroy everything she’s working towards._

_I want to keep mom alive._

“Ben.” His father’s taken a step closer to him, and his hand is resting on Ben’s shoulder. Now he’s looking down at his father, the way his father used to look down at him. That’s when he realizes he’s chewing nothing at all, just like the way he’s always done when he’s distressed—a tic he’d gotten from his father. “You in too deep?”

_Yes._

“There is a prisoner I seek to recover,” he says calmly. “I will exchange her for Luke Skywalker.”

Han Solo takes a slow breath. “Rey,” he says.

“Yes,” he replies. 

“So Snoke can torture her? Crush her soul?”

“Train her. She is strong with the Force—stronger than she knows.”

“I don’t think she wants your training,” Han says. “In fact, I don’t think she ever wants to see you again.”

“So you’d rather I take Luke to Snoke? The Supreme Leader will have him killed.”

His father hesitates. _Come on. Come on. Come on._

“Let me talk to Luke,” Han says. 

“So you can confirm with him that he’s willing to sacrifice himself for a girl he’s never met?”

“Yeah,” Han replies and there’s a steely edge to his gaze now. “Exactly that.”

Ben swallows.

If he thought his father were weak of mind, he’d try a mind game. Instead, though, he looks at him. “Do you really think I’d hurt her?” he asks.

“After what you did to her on Starkiller, I don’t know what you’re capable of.”

_I did to her no worse than what was done to me, _he wants to say, but somehow, instead, he finds himself saying,

“Worse will befall her if she doesn’t come with me. I am kinder than Snoke is. And more likely to leave those who stand in my way alive.”

“That so, Jedi Killer?”

Oh it stings worse than anything else, his father calling him that. _You in too deep? _he’d asked only moments before and now—

_I’m just a monster_, he thinks. _That’s all I’ve ever been. All I’ve ever been to any of them._

_You’re not a monster, _a voice that sounds like Rey’s? Kira’s? God, he has to save her. He’s got a very bad feeling about all this, the sort of bad feeling his father couldn’t even begin to understand. 

“Dad?” Han Solo goes still and Ben swallows. “I—I can’t explain it. But I got a bad feeling about this.”

Han looks behind him towards the ship that contains Luke and Rey. Then he nods, and Ben feels like a weight has been lifted off his chest.

**Rey**

“You stay here,” he tells her the moment he’s up the gangplank.

“I will not,” Rey snaps.

“You will—you want to make sure Kira ends up dead? Showing up in the middle of the Resistance when they think she’s you is probably gonna end up pretty bad for her.”

That stops Rey short. She doesn’t like that. Not at all. But she also can’t for the life of her see a way out of it. Because she doesn’t want Kira dead. 

“I’ll keep an eye on them,” Luke tells her quietly before following Kylo down the gangplank of the ship and leaving Rey alone to wait.

Rey hates waiting.

She paces up and down and up and down. She practices reaching out with the Force. She even practices some of the combat techniques she knows to try and keep her mind off everything.

But she can’t.

Somewhere on this planet, far away, thirty clicks south, something is happening. Kira and Ben and Luke and Han—Finn too, probably.

And she’s here trying so hard not to get them all killed by doing nothing.

She hates it.

But she doesn’t know what else she can do. She can’t very well get thirty clicks south on foot. 

Which is when she notices something staring at the ship—a tall creature the likes of which she’s never seen before. It’s taller even than Ben, with a long flat snout and scaled ears that are so long that it’s thrown them back behind its shoulders.

Rey waves.

The creature waves back.

Rey lowers the gangplank and steps out into the fresh air. Oh, it’s so soft on her skin! She will never get over being free of Jakku—not ever.

“You all right there?” the creature asks in neat Basic. 

“Ship’s a bit out of sorts. Need to get parts, but I’m not from around here and don’t know how to get there.”

The creature nods, examining the ship.

“It’s a nice ship.”

“It is,” Rey agrees. “Any sense of how I could get to Theed from here? If the ship can’t fly?” It won’t fly without Kylo’s code anyway. It’ll be fine on its own. 

And if it’s not, well, she’s not entirely sure she could begrudge someone plundering it. Especially since it _is_ a First Order ship.

The creature nods. “We’re headed that way now. You could hitch a ride with us, okieday?”

Once she wouldn’t have trusted stranger, but Naboo is a softer place than Jakku and she can also feel the stranger’s genuine desire to help her swirling in his every intention. Rey’s face splits into a smile. “That would be so kind,” she says. “Thank you.”

“This way!” he says and he leads her over a hill towards a lake and a moment later, Rey is getting into a water speeder of some sort. She takes a deep breath. _Don’t fall out. You’ll drown. _

And off they go.


	12. Chapter 12

**Finn**

Rey’s tense—more tense than Finn’s seen her in a while. Every relaxed smile and motion from their exploration of Theed is gone. She seems hard, withdrawn—far more like the Rey he’d first encountered on Jakku, the Rey who’d demanded that he stop holding her hand than the one who reaches for him in comfort.

“What’s wrong?” he tries asking her, but she just shakes her head. No words, no nothing, as though keeping her silence will prevent whatever she is evidently afraid of from happening. 

“Any idea what might be wrong?” he asks Rose when Rey disappears, not even bothering to find some sort of excuse. Finn lets her go, but he can’t shake the feeling that everything’s about to go south, that bad things are about to happen.

Rose shakes her head. “Maybe she’s just overwhelmed. She hasn’t spent a lot of time planetside where there’s a lot of people.”

“Yeah,” Finn says slowly. That could be it, but he doesn’t think so. And he can tell from Rose’s tone that she doesn’t think so either. She rests her hand on his arm and his breath hitches and when he looks down at her, she looks so very determined. But she, too, doesn’t say anything. Why is it that people keep not saying things? It is a plague that seems to happen wherever Finn and Rose end up. 

Han Solo and Chewie left without a word.

Vice Admiral Holdo and Poe bustling around not telling anyone what they’re doing.

General Organa and Pooja Naberrie give one another significant glances over whatever work they are doing, but they don’t say a thing.

The silence is overpowering and Finn doesn’t like it.

“Wish we were back outside,” he mutters to Rose at last.

“Yeah,” she agrees. But doesn’t say more.

“Want to go for a walk?” he asks her. “Just…just stop waiting?” He remembers Rey saying she was good at waiting. He wishes she were here so he could ask her how she did it.

“Sure,” Rose says and the two of them go out into the catacombs. He’s glad he’s moving. It makes him feel like he’s doing something, even though he’s not. Maybe if he can get his head in order, he won’t feel so anxious.

“Why does it feel like this?” Finn asks Rose.

“Like what?” she asks, a little breathily.

“Like—” he cuts himself off. He tries again. “Like—“ But he swallows the words back down and suddenly, for the first time, it’s Rose’s hand in his. 

She tries to kiss his cheek, but he turns his face at the last moment and her lips are against his, soft and sweet and he likes this too, he likes this a lot. He hears her breath hitch but she doesn’t pull away—at least not quickly, not in recoil. She blinks up at him and if it weren’t for the dark he senses she’d be blushing. 

“Like that?” she asks him softly and Finn’s head can’t even begin to process the words, the way it felt to have her lips on his, her hand in his, what this even means because suddenly the tunnel they’re walking through is filled with red.

“Don’t move,” comes a lazy rich tenor voice. 

And Rose does, whirling around and reaching for the blaster she’s been keeping at her hip ever since Finn had shown her how to use it and Finn’s hand shoots out, grabbing her wrist.

Because that’s not a vibrokinfe.

That’s a lightsaber.

It’s bleeding red in the darkness and Finn doesn’t need to be told to realize he’s standing face to face with a Knight of Ren. No one else carries lightsabers. There aren’t Jedi. The only other person he knows to have a lightsaber is Rey, with Luke’s at her hip, but she doesn’t know how to use it.

“Yes, wise,” the tenor says, smiling. He has a straight, aquiline nose and bright blue eyes. “Self-preservation is always commendable. Now, where is she?”

“Who?” Finn asks sharply.

“Your little sandrat friend,” the man says as though enjoying a private joke. 

“We don’t know, and even if we did, we wouldn’t tell _you_,” spits Rose and Finn’s stomach turns. No, no, no, this isn’t just any villain—this is a Knight of Ren. He and Rose—they’re dead the second he wants them dead because there’s nothing they can do to stand up to him. He’s powerful with the Force. He has a lightsaber. And he's hunting for Rey. He wants her dead. 

“Is that so?” the knight asks. He gives a smile that looks more like a leer, and suddenly Rose is torn from Finn’s hand, being dragged as though by a string towards him until she’s dangling in the air midway between them.

“No!” The shout rips its way out of Finn’s throat before he can stop it.

“Finn!” Rose barks at him—trying to keep him quiet, keep him safe, but his heart is beating too much for that.

“Yes,” the knight says evenly. “Let’s try this again, shall we?”

And there’s lightning flowing from the tips of his fingers and Rose writhes in the air silently, refusing to scream, and he lets out a rolling, cold laugh as he watches her flail in pain. 

Finn reaches for his blaster but it flies from his hand and crashes to the ground behind the knight before he’s even gotten close to putting his finger around the trigger. 

“Let’s try this one more time, shall we?” the Knight asks when the lightning is done, when Rose is hanging in the air, limp and panting. “Where is your little,” he takes a step closer, “sandrat,” and another, “friend?”

His eyes are like ice as they turn to Finn. 

_He’ll kill them both._

Finn is sure of it.

This man was trained by Kylo Ren. He knows nothing of compassion, nothing of kindness. Was this what Ren had done to Rey?

“You’ll have to kill us,” Rose barks before Finn can reply. “Go on. We’re _never_ giving her up.”

“Oh,” the knight says, turning his gaze back to Rose. “Don’t worry. I’m sure you won’t come out of this alive. But don’t you want your death to matter?”

“Yes,” Rose snarls and her defiance, her bravery—it takes Finn’s breath away. He wishes he was standing there more than terrified. Poe had been wrong—he’s just a coward. He isn’t more than his fear. “Which is why you’ll have to kill us.”

“And is that what you want, FN-2187? To die with such a purpose? Help me and I’m sure I can convince the Supreme Leader to spare your life. I’m sure you can be safe from the First Order’s wrath.”

_And what is that life without them?_

To think he’d ever thought of running. He could have run far, and fast and it would have preserved his body—but his heart?

The knight is too far away for Finn to tackle him, and even if he did, he’s a Knight of Ren. He is a master of hand-to-hand combat, probably. 

He squares his shoulder. 

All it had taken were those seven characters. 

FN-2187.

“Yeah,” he says and he sounds so easy, so confident. “Why do you think I left in the first place?”

And that’s when the lightning hits him too.

**Kira**

She does her best to suppress her Force signature. She doesn’t want Veesh finding her. She doesn’t want Veesh anywhere near her. 

_Do it, _he had commanded, but who was he to command her?

The answer is one she doesn’t like: the one Kylo had left in charge.

Her hands are still but her heart is rioting in her chest. It makes it hard to be near Finn and Rose. She can’t pretend that things are all right when Finn keeps looking at her like that. _I’m not who you think I am. I’ve been lying to you. Don’t care about me. You shouldn’t care about me._

But he does. It makes it worse.

She slips away from them to find a quiet space to center herself, to remind herself that she is Kira of the Knights of Ren. She is stalwart, she is brave, she is tried and true. She doesn’t let her feelings get in the way of her mission. She gets things done.

Except this.

Why can’t she do this?

She wishes Kylo were there. He’d know how to stoke her rage, help her find it within herself to do what needed to be done. He’d always been good at that. He wouldn’t have Veesh’s horrible, condescending, snakelike—

“Everything all right?”

Leia Organa is standing there. Just there. Just in front of her. One flick of her hand and she could close her windpipe forever. Make it look like a heart attack until she was long gone. _But then what about Finn? And Rose? _

“Sweetheart—” Leia says, reaching a hand out and that’s when she realizes she’s crying.

No—no. No, she doesn’t cry. She hasn’t cried since they left Rey. She didn’t cry when Luke almost killed Ben, didn’t cry when Kylo slaughtered their peers, didn’t cry—

Except she did.

When she found Rey again. And then again when Leia Organa had found her on the _Raddus_.

_Tears mean family._

It’s not a helpful thought.

Kylo is her brother and this is her mother, and his mother feels guilty about everything, and wants to see him again, to make amends for the way she’d hurt him, and she can’t—she can’t—

Leia’s arms are around her, holding her in a way she hasn’t been held since she was small. She’s cooing gentle soothing sounds into her ear and Kira’s trembling, afraid. “Whatever it is, it’ll be all right,” Leia murmurs.

“It won’t,” Kira tells her. She pulls away and suddenly she’s running—every muscle in her body moving as fast as she can to get away.

If she’s away, she can’t kill her—won’t kill her mother.

How she’s longed to kill her own mother for leaving her. And Leia left Ben, lied to him, the way her mother lied to her. 

But she can’t do it, she can’t. She’s weak. A waste of space.

And the only person who could help her not feel that way is far, far away, doing their master’s bidding.

That is when the comlink in her pocket sparks to life.

“Oh Rey,” comes Veesh’s voice. “Where are you, Rey?”

She goes very still.

That’s not her Ren issued communication device. That’s the Resistance one. 

“Your _friends_ are looking for you, Rey,” says Veesh again. “They want to find you. Don’t you want to find them?”

She stays silent. 

“Or, let me rephrase,” Veesh says and he lowers his voice. “If you don’t come to find them, they’ll be dead within the hour.”

And the connection fizzles silent again and Kira leans against the wall.

There it is.

There’s the rage she’d wanted. 

There’s the pain that she can turn into power, the way she’d been trained. There’s the cold control.

She’s going to rip his head from his body and throw it into the river if he touches a hair on their heads. She’ll figure out a way.

Nothing can beat her. Nothing can _touch _her.

**Kylo**

Kylo ignores any and all attempts to get him to talk the entire ride to Theed.

“What’s going on, kid?” his father asks more than once. “Talk to me.”

But he won’t say a word. He needs to steel himself, to fortify himself. If he says a word right now, all his weakness will burst out of him, will send him crying to his father as it had felt like he was doing in that field. 

He’s not a little boy with a nightmare anymore. He's the master of the Knights of Ren. He is a servant of the dark side. He’s given everything to the dark side.

The dark side can let him have Kira and his mother.

_Weak, _he thinks. _Weak._

_If I can just do this, then I can be strong. If they don’t die, then there will be no fear left in me—only strength. And then I will be everything my master wants of me._

_Everything I want of myself._

“What’s he doing?” he hears his father ask Luke. 

Luke, for once in his fucking life, stays silent. Kylo assumes he doesn’t want to blow Kira’s cover, which is a courtesy that Ben would never have expected. He wonders if he’s doing it for Rey, because he’s definitely not doing it for Kylo.

Kylo can feel all their eyes on him but he doesn’t care.

He has no idea what he’s doing, but that doesn’t matter. If he pays too much attention to that now, he won’t have the strength to do what he needs to do.

What does he need to do?

He focuses on Kira, his best friend, his sister. He sees her now, pale and sardonic and trusting him without hesitation. She who had thrown herself to the dark side for him without batting an eyelash—the support he’d never once gotten from his family.

And her sister—how unlike her and yet so like her. She cared about him. She supported him too, even if she was at his throat all the time. And somehow he liked her at his throat. _Save them both, _he can hear Rey saying. Kira would _never_ ask to be saved. She’d die for pride if she had to, but Rey would cry, and beg that he do the right thing.

_What even is the right thing? _

His dad had asked if he was in too deep. But he’s not sure that what his parents—what Luke—want of him if that’s the right thing. How can it be the right thing if it constantly asks that he destroy himself? How? 

His father and Luke talk quietly. He doesn’t listen. He’s sure that whatever they’re saying—if it’s meant for his ears—will be designed to bait him. He doesn’t need to deal with that. He needs to find strength and truth of purpose.

His master would know what to say to him, would know how to make this all clear. But when he reaches for Snoke’s memories, all he remembers is pain, and anger, and being told he’s worthless too. It makes his breath catch in his throat.

_Testing my resolve? _he wonders. That’s what this is—a test of his resolve. He’d been weak not killing Luke and this is an opportunity for redemption. That’s it.

They arrive in Theed after the sun has set, in a wide public garden that’s full of fountains. It’s oddly beautiful for what is going on.

“Stay here,” his father says to him. “We can’t go walking _Kylo Ren_ into the middle of a Resistance base.”

“How do you propose convincing K—Rey to come out, then?” he replies, turning his anxiety into acid as he looks at his father.

“I’ll go,” Luke says. “Pretty sure if Luke Skywalker can’t convince a fan to do what he wants, no one can.” He says it lightly enough, but there’s something sharp in his eyes. _Why do you want to keep Kira alive? _Kylo wonders at him. _Because she alone of your students survived?_

“On your honor, then,” Kylo says, completely acidly now. “Bring her back. You’re the exchange for her. Don’t forget that.”

“I won’t,” Luke replies benignly and he and Han and Chewie stroll off through the garden and out of sight.

He stands there for a long moment. It’s dark out. The city is dotted with golden lamplight, and above him, there are silver stars in a clear sky. Even if he’s on edge, it’s hard to ignore how beautiful it is, especially with the calming sound of waterfalls in the distance. 

The air is soft on his skin. 

He breathes.

He waits.

Rey had waited for such a long time. He can wait—what—twenty minutes? Twenty minutes and then Kira will be safe, and his mother won’t be dead, and then he’ll have to figure out what on _earth_ to do about all this because Snoke is right here, and he’s going to be in so much trouble. He just went and fucked everything up, didn’t he? 

Weak.

Barely more than the self-control of a self-important child.

But at least Kira will be alive.

“I was wondering if you’d be here.”

He doesn’t have the energy to be surprised. Snoke had told him Veesh was on Naboo, after all. Of course he’d have sought him out the moment he sensed his presence in the city.

“Veesh,” he says calmly, turning to look at the knight. He’s not wearing a mask either. 

He has seen Veesh’s face once or twice before—usually by accident. The man has clear blue eyes and an aquiline nose and always has. What’s new is the almost genial smile on his face, and the hunger he can see even in the darkness. 

“Here for the traitor?”

“Traitor?” Kylo asks. 

“Kira Ren. She tried to save the lives of these Resistance fighters,” he says gesturing. From behind some trees, two people appear. Both are unconscious, their heads lolling uncomfortably from side to side as they float through the air towards him. He doesn’t recognize the woman, small with dark hair that’s pulled back from her face into twin tails. 

But he does recognize the man. The traitor from Taunul. FN-2187. _Finn. _

_Rey’s friend._

“I’m sure she had her reasons. She has never had any reason not to be reliable in the past,” Kylo replies. _Keep calm,_ he remembers. As if he’s ever been capable of keeping himself in calm control. As if his heart isn’t hammering so loudly in his chest that he’s astonished Veesh can’t hear it now.

“That so?” Veesh asks. “I suppose we could interrogate her, but I think we’ll have to wait until the Supreme Leader has finished with her.”

Goosebumps erupt across his skin, fear, confusion, foreboding. 

“The Supreme Leader is here?” His voice sounds too smooth, so obviously a lie. He picks at his sleeve, trying to look bored. 

“Oh yes,” Veesh says. “He wanted to personally oversee the destruction of the Resistance. Since apparently his lieutenants couldn’t be trusted to do this.”

“He of little faith,” Kylo says.

“Oh, he of too much faith.” Veesh lifts his chin slightly. “But then again, she’s always been such a good liar. Something you’ve always praised in her. It makes sense—that you wouldn’t expect to have been taken in yourself, that she would lean into the advantage she held with your fondness. You wouldn’t believe the truth even if it was right under your nose so long as it was Kira telling the lie, would you?” He pauses, watching Kylo closely. Kylo is standing there, not letting himself feel or think a damn thing because if he does then everything will fall apart. “You’ve never liked me much, have you? Kira was always your favorite.”

“We’re not supposed to form attachments,” Kylo says.

“An old Jedi teaching. Not the way of the dark side. Your emotions are your power.”

“Don’t presume to lecture me on the ways of the Force,” Kylo replies. 

“Why not? I might have more to share with you than you think?” Veesh smiles at him. “I think you have the impression of me, Kylo Ren. I think you never came to know me as you should have. I think we could have been quite as close as brothers. That was what was intended, after all.”

There’s an odd, hungry look in Veesh’s eyes. 

“How what was intended?” Kylo asks.

Veesh takes a step towards him and Kylo throws up his Force signature, making the clone stop in his tracks. He pauses. Considers.

“You are your grandfather’s grandson,” he says. “Strong with the Force. So very powerful. And I—well, I survived, didn’t I?” He looks around this garden. “Did you know, I once strolled through this garden with your grandmother. I would have been older looking then. She trusted me, cared for me. So did your grandfather. I think they would have wanted me to look after you.”

Kylo can’t keep the incredulity off his face. 

Veesh Ren has lost his mind.

“Well,” Veesh corrects himself. “Your grandfather would have. Your grandmother died resisting me. And they thought her legacy won in the end.” The hunger in those blue eyes—Kylo has never seen anything like it before. Especially when they twist into a sneer. “But that is the weakness they do not realize they have, isn’t it? Rest on your laurels, assume the best of anyone who crosses your path. It’s so easily manipulable. I think you and I—well, we could be brothers. Don’t you think? We could work together as once I did with your grandfather.”

Kylo’s mind is racing with everything he’s ever known about his own grandfather, about his grandmother, about what they might have been. 

And then it hits him like a punch to the gut.

“You cloned yourself,” he says. “In the Unknown Regions. You—”

“Survived.”

And Sheev Palpatine gives him the most horrible gloating smile he’s ever seen in his life.


	13. Chapter 13

**Kylo**

There is no hesitation.

He sinks to his knees before him. “Your majesty,” he says quietly. His heart is pounding in his throat and he doesn’t look up until the Emperor addresses him.

“You’ve done well, Kylo Ren,” he says and he continues to sound jovial, but that hungry edge to his voice has not gone. “Your grandfather would be proud of you.”

“You honor me.” He keeps his voice as quiet as he can, his mind as blank as he can.

But that damn heart won’t stop beating in his chest, rioting against his ribs as though they are a cage doing all they can to keep him in. 

The Emperor is standing before him.

Darth Sidious.

A clone, yes, but now that he has nothing to hide, Kylo can feel the sheer power that his recreated body contains. 

“Victory can be assured now that you are at my side,” Palpatine continues, smiling down at him. How rare it is, to get a smile from someone whom he would serve. Snoke did not smile at him and Skywalker—

As if summoned by the thought of him, he sees a tall figure approaching in the darkness, recognizes the way he moves from years and years of seeing him approach in the darkness.

“Master,” Kylo says in deference as Snoke arrives.

“He knows?” Snoke asks Palpatine, though it sounds only barely more than a statement. Under what other circumstances would Kylo take his knee before Veesh Ren?

“He knows,” Palpatine replies evenly. “And now we have everything we need.”

And Kylo’s heart swells. 

Everything they need. A Vader reborn, a master of the darkness.

**Rey**

The Gungans leave Rey in the main square of Theed when the stars and moon are high in the sky. She can feel Kylo’s Force signature clear across the city and the moment that she waves the Gungans away, she’s off, sprinting as fast as she can towards it, tearing through alleys and under archways. She barely has time to take in the flowers hanging in baskets overhead, or the gentle rustling of musical bugs in the air. She has to be able to help. She needs to help. She wants to help.

She tears her way into a garden full of beautiful carved statues and fountains and bushes that have been cut into artful shapes. She pelts her way through it until—

She stops short.

There’s Kylo, but he’s not alone.

He’s on his knees, his head bowed respectfully before another man dressed entirely in black. Two figures are hanging in the air, unconscious a few feet behind him, and standing on his other side is Snoke. 

Snoke is here.

_You will give me everything._

Cold sweat breaks out across her brow. _Run,_ she can hear someone—Ben?—telling her. _Save yourself. Don’t do this._

She takes a deep breath. None of them seems to have noticed her. She tries to remember what Luke had taught her about hiding her Force signature. Deep breaths. Focus. Control.

She crouches down and inches her way through the hedges, straining her ears for any hint of their conversation. They’re all speaking quietly but eventually she does hear it. 

“…and I am honored that your majesty has chosen to reveal himself to me,” Kylo is saying. _Majesty? _Who is majesty?

“I do appreciate,” the other man in black says, “That this is happening here. It started here the last time, on my homeworld. You have served me well, but now I think it’s time for me to come out from behind the curtain, to cease being the phantom once again.”

“How long have you known, master?” Kylo asks.

“About our Emperor?” Snoke asks. “Why—for a long time. I was given the special task to care for him should anything go awry during the Battle of Jakku. He was cloned in my lab in the Unknown Regions. It took many years to get it right, but we prevailed in the end.”

“And why didn’t you tell me? Surely I could have been trusted.”

“Trust,” interjects the man in black. He laughs. His laugh—there’s something familiar about his laugh. But Rey has never seen the man before in her life, why is his laugh familiar? “You want my trust, Kylo? Then you shall have it. I have much and more I can teach you, as I taught your grandfather.”

_What_ is going on?

“Will you train under me? Become Darth Kylo as he was Darth Vader?”

Rey’s hands tighten in the bush, twigs snapping under her fingers. _Ben, please don’t go this way._

“If my master will consent,” Kylo says quietly. “If he thinks I am ready for such training.”

“As if this isn’t the culmination of your training,” Snoke says proudly. “I told you that you had nothing to fear.”

The man in black, he hums as though unconvinced. He looks down at Kylo.

“I will have nothing to fear,” he says. “I do not accept fear in my students. If you aren’t prepared to give me everything, then you are too weak to bear the title Darth, unfit to carry your grandfather’s mantle.”

Kylo doesn’t respond. He just keeps breathing.

_Ben,_ Rey pleads silently. _Ben, no. No, you know this is wrong._

“Do you know of your grandfather and Obi-Wan Kenobi?” The man in black asks.

“Obi-Wan trained my grandfather to be a Jedi. My grandfather slew him in combat years later.”

“Obi-Wan tried to convince your grandfather he had gone too far when first he embraced the Dark Side. They dueled on Mustafar. Your grandfather—he used to think of Obi-Wan as a brother, but it was Obi-Wan who betrayed him and cut off his legs and left him to die in flames. It was Obi-Wan who stole his children from him, who oversaw the tragic end of your beloved grandmother. Your grandfather wished desperately that he could have killed Obi-Wan when he had the chance.

“You have your own Obi-Wan, don’t you? The traitor, who chose the Resistance over you? Who chose your mother’s rats over her loyalty to you?”

And Kylo looks up, staring at the man in black for the first time since Rey had reached the garden and with a horrible, sinking feeling, Rey remembers where she’d heard his laugh before.

He’d laughed when she’d stared into the void of hyperspace—triumphant, victorious.

The man in black waves a hand and a third figure is dragged out of the darkness, through the air, and thrown to the ground. An all-too-familiar figure, with her hands tied behind her back and three neat little buns tied to the back of her head.

“I think you know what to do, Darth Kylo.”

**Kira**

There is blood dripping down Kira’s face as she looks up. The skin had scraped against the gravel pathway and it stings now as she looks up at Kylo.

There are about ten feet between the two of them, but it could be a hundred, could be a thousand. 

His eyes are empty, the way they had been the night he’d killed the rest of Luke’s students. Her mouth goes dry.

_He won’t kill me, _she thinks but does not say, and even as she thinks it, doubt floods her. Why is he looking at her like that? Does he know she had refused to kill his mother, failed? Does he think that means she doesn’t care about him too? Does he think her worse than a traitor? 

She is filled with the urge to apologize, to cry, to scream, _Kylo_—_Ben_—_I couldn't, but it wasn’t because I didn’t want to, it was my own weakness. You deserve justice. You deserve peace. Do what I couldn’t. Please. Take it yourself. I failed you. I’m sorry._

But her lips stay shut. She can’t do it. She refuses to do it. She won’t beg. She won’t break. She won’t give _Veesh Ren_ the gratification of knowing he’d broken her before she died. Nothing breaks her. Nothing.

And suddenly there are boots and legs blocking her view, also black—another knight.

Except that’s not a knight’s voice speaking.

That’s her own.

“No, you can’t do this. Ben, this isn’t you.”

And Veesh laughs. “Ben,” he mocks. “She truly doesn’t understand you, Kylo, if she insists on calling you that.”

“Rey?”

The name falls from Kira’s lips as she looks up at her sister. Her sister who’d hissed at her like a hellcat on Starkiller base, who she’d pretended to be, whose friendships she’d stolen for days—her sister is standing between her and her brother.

“This isn’t you,” Rey insists. “Ben, you know this isn’t right.”

“Appealing to his greater sense of honor?” leers Snoke. “What’s this—has she developed compassion for you? Well done. It seems that part of your mission was a success, bringing her into your sphere. She’s attached now, isn’t she? Well done.”

“I’d get out of the way,” Veesh says quietly to Rey. “If you value your life. If you think your life is worth—”

And Rey lunges at him, and it takes Kira a moment to realize that the Luke’s lightsaber that’s burning blue in Rey’s hand as she charges—she’d summoned it from Veesh’s own belt.

He leaps out of the way, twisting and turning, meeting her blade with a red one of his own. 

“You know nothing of what I’m worth,” Rey snarls. “I’m worth more than you can _fathom_,” and she slices at him. It’s an inelegant slice, but it makes its mark, cutting a deep gash into his arm before she has to dance away, out of the reach of his blade. “What do you think you’re worth?”

But he doesn’t respond. He just lifts his hand and—

“Rey!” Kira lurches to her feet, dragging her sister away from the lightning that’s emanating from Veesh’s hand and wracking her body. Rey has more fight than sense, it seems, and insulting a powerful Force user, right to his face...

Rey’s gasping and shuddering and Kira pulls her into her arms, holding her close. She can feel the static remains of the lightning jump between them. Kira summons Rey’s lightsaber to her hand and ignites it once more.

She levels it at Veesh Ren.

“So they choose one another over you,” Veesh says, straightening and looking at Kylo. “How typical. You are everyone’s last choice. Everyone’s except mine.”

“That’s not true,” Kira cries out, her gaze shifting at once to Kylo. This she doesn’t care if Veesh hears. This isn’t her breaking. This is the truth—_her_ truth since she was six. She picked Kylo over death and honor, picked him to be her brother when her parents threw her aside. He’s _never_ last to her. Not ever. “Kylo—Ben—I—you know that’s not true.”

“Isn’t it?” Veesh asks. “She chose _your mother_ over her orders.”

“I _didn’t_!” Kira roars now, too angry, too upset to care anymore.

“The little liar chose to keep Leia Organa alive, chose the Resistance over you—her so-called dearest friend. And now she picks the sandrat of a sister that she didn’t even think was _real_ until a few weeks ago over you. Has she ever cared about you? Or was she only ever pretending, lying in wait, as Obi-Wan pretended to care for Vader? Even you have called her the best liar you have ever known. Search your feelings. You know it to be true.”

Kylo’s eyes don’t leave hers. She doesn’t know what she sees there. She doesn’t recognize whatever’s in his eyes at all. He’s feeling too much, or perhaps nothing at all.

Her throat is too dry. When she swallows, it rasps against itself. It’s dryer than Jakku, dryer than Rey’s prison for thirteen damn years and he’s her brother—doesn’t he know he’s her brother?

And then the Force is jerking the ignited lightsaber out of her hand, plunging it straight into Veesh’s heart and she lets out a startled cry as Kylo’s own red saber and crossguard slash through the air right in front of her face. She has just enough time to dodge backwards before he lunges towards a completely surprised Snoke.

Then both sabers disengage and there is only darkness.

**Kylo**

It had been easy in the end.

Easier than he would have ever thought—far easier than killing Luke’s students on Yavin IV all those years before. Those are ghosts that will haunt him until he dies. 

This though?

It turns out that when it came between killing Kira and not killing Kira, the answer was obvious: destroy those who would destroy him. And that’s before he’d even begun to process Rey, who was still standing in her sister’s arms. 

It was fucking strange to see both of them standing there—Rey in the dark, Kira in the light. He has never actually seen them side-by-side. Strange, that he can identify the differences between them now, despite their clothing. Rey is more grounded. Kira’s stance is tighter. And Rey’s eyes are always the brighter of the two.

Then Rey runs to him and throws her arms around his neck while Kira hurries close as well. He feels her arm around his shoulder as Rey kisses his cheek. “I knew you wouldn’t do it,” she tells him and there are tears in her voice. “I knew it.”

“Yeah?” he says.

“Yeah,” she replies. 

And suddenly Rey’s lips are on his and his brain sort of short circuits. Is it possible that some of the lightning that had struck her is sending an electrical charge from her lips to his? Is that possible? She pulls away and her eyes are so bright in the darkness.

“How did you get here?” he asks her, which is probably not the most pressing thing to find out the answer to, but then again he’d just killed both his master and the clone of Emperor Palpatine. He’s not really sure that anything matters.

“Some Gungans gave me a lift,” she says. “They were very nice.”

“Right,” he replies. She’s still got her arms around him. When had his arm wrapped itself snugly around her waist? He’s got her propped against his hip and he slowly puts her down because—as it turns out—her feet are in the air. He doesn’t want to let go of her, though, and feels suddenly so cold when she unwinds her arms from around his neck and slides her hand into his.

He rips his gaze off hers and turns to Kira, who is watching them with eyes narrowed.

“You ok?” he asks her gruffly.

“Yeah,” she replies. He has no idea how to express how glad he is to hear her say that. Given that she and Rey are identical, he’d forgotten how much he missed her low, dry tone, almost deadpan. 

“Good,” he says and his voice is a little too thick. 

He can’t bring himself to let go of Rey’s hand but he wraps his free arm around Kira and gives her a gruff, awkward hug. They’re not huggers. They’ve never hugged before in their lives. Honestly it’s more than a little weird. But he’s glad of it.

“You ok?” she asks him.

“I’m…” his eyes land on the corpses in front of him.

Kira claps him on the shoulder and he almost bursts out laughing. This is ridiculous. This is utterly ridiculous.

“I’m gonna…” Kira says jerking her head towards where the two members of the Resistance are still lying.

“Yeah, go,” he says and she goes off.

“Finn!” Rey yells and she takes off after Kira and his hand is empty. 

He flexes his fingers. 

Just a flick and he’d destroyed a burgeoning Empire.

_Vader died to save me. _The memory comes from a long time ago, somewhere on Yavin IV, his uncle’s eyes distant as he tells him._ He destroyed the Empire._

That’s when Kylo decides to sit down in the gravel. He summons his lightsaber to his hand and hooks it into his belt as he hears the two Resistance fighters groaning as they make their way back to consciousness.

“What happened?”

His dad’s standing there his blaster limp in his hand. Luke is on his tail as is—

His mother’s eyes are bright as she stares at him.

“Is that Snoke?” his father breathes.

Which, unsurprisingly, drags Leia Organa’s attention away from her long-lost son. Ever the politician. Ben looks down at his lightsaber. 

“Ben, did you—”

He looks back at her. Her lips are trembling, her breath is shaky as she takes one step and then another towards him. 

“He wanted me to kill Kira,” he says. “And he wanted Kira to kill you. And I—”

He doesn’t want to brag. He wants them all to stop staring at him. He wants Rey to be back and holding his hand. 

He wants his mother to hold him.

She kneels down next to him in the dirt and does exactly that, running her hands over his face, his hair, pulling his head against her chest. She holds him as close as she can, and a moment later his dad’s sitting down next to him too, resting a hand on his shoulder. He’s trembling and shaking and they’re there. They’re there.

He’s glad that Luke doesn’t try to join in, but he does look up at his uncle and see—what seems like for the first time in his life—a flash of pride.

Suddenly he feels very, very tired. Like he could sleep for days. When had he last slept?


	14. Chapter 14

**Finn**

Finn wasn’t seeing double when he saw two Reys hovering over him as he regained consciousness.

He can’t stop looking between them. Rey and—

“Kira,” Rey, the one in the grey jacket and the light shirt, tells him carefully. She extends a hand. 

“Kira Ren?” he asks sharply and Rey—Kira swallows. 

“Yes,” she says.

He stares at her long and hard, his heart pounding in his ears. She’d _kissed_ him. He’d _kissed_ a Knight of Ren. He’d been ready to die for her. He’d been tortured for her.

“Finn,” Rey—the real Rey, the one in black—says softly.

“No, it’s fine,” Kira says, getting to her feet. “I get it.” And she walks away. There’s a stiffness to her shoulders he’s never seen before. But then again, she’d been pretending to be Rey this whole time. 

“Where were you?” he asks Rey a little harder than he intends.

“Hostage,” she says sadly. “Then…” she glances over her shoulder. He can’t see who is sitting on the ground, but he can see the corpse of the man who’d sent lightning through Rose, through him.

“Who was that?” he asks, nodding to the dead man. There’s another dead figure too. That one’s bisected. 

It’s General Organa’s voice that replies—or rather, that doesn’t. “We should get below ground,” she says. “We don’t want to draw attention to ourselves.”

“Don’t want to draw attention?” Han laughs. “They’re _dead_.”

“And we don’t know if there are more soldiers lying in wait. Don’t worry—we’ll let the galaxy know what happened. But I—” she doesn’t continue. 

Kira helps the man who’s sitting on the ground to his feet and he towers over her. He’s wearing black too, and has long dark hair and even without his mask, Finn knows who he is.

“What’s _Kylo Ren_ doing here?” he hisses at Rey. “What’s going on?”

“We’ll explain, I promise,” Rey says. She helps him to his feet, then he reaches for Rose’s hand and helps her up too. She’s been silent the whole time, her face closed off as she looks between Rey, and Kira, and Finn again.

“You all right?” Finn asks Rose quietly. He’s still holding her hand and finds he doesn’t much want to let it go right now. It’s making him feel a little more grounded, a little more settled in all this.

“Yeah,” she says. “You?”

He nods. “I’m fine.” Physically, at least. He turns to Rey. “Did they torture you?” he asks her. “Did Kylo Ren—”

“He saved my life,” Rey says staunchly. “And I saved his. He saved all of ours.”

She looks back over to the group of people a few feet off. He and a man Finn doesn’t recognize have extended their hands and are using the Force to carry the dead. 

Rose is leaning heavily against him. 

“Who’s this?” Rey asks him quietly.

“This is—“ How to explain Rose? He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know what he thinks about any of this. There are two Reys, one of whom is acting as though Kylo Ren is a hero, the other of whom is a Knight of Ren, and Rose had been willing to die to keep them all safe. 

"I’m Rose,” she says. 

“Rey,” Rey says, smiling. Rose nods and glances at Finn.

“Who’s that?” He points to the other man.

“That’s Luke Skywalker.”

_Luke Skywalker. _Ok, now he’s really starting to think he’s hallucinating or something.

They make their way underground and follow the General to the private room that they’d turned into her headquarters. Amilyn Holdo and Poe are waiting for them there.

“General, what happened?” Poe asks the second he catches sight of them all.

Vice Admiral Holdo, however, looks straight at Kylo Ren and whispers, “Ben?”

“Hi Aunt Amilyn,” he mumbles before throwing himself in a chair. His eyes are on Rey who’s still standing next to Finn, before turning his gaze to Kira, who’s standing in the corner by the door, her face oddly distraught.

“All right,” the General says, looking around the room. “What’s going on?”

Kylo’s eyes go to Kira’s and she takes a deep breath.

“I failed you, Leia,” Luke says and everyone’s attention snaps to him. “I—I failed Ben. I was weak, and he suffered for it. I couldn’t protect him from Snoke, but I couldn’t protect him from my own weakness either. I’m sorry.”

The General’s eyes go to Kylo, who is staring at his uncle with an exhausted expression. “I failed him too,” she says quietly.

“Who’s Ben?” Finn whispers to Rey.

“That’s Ben. Kylo Ren. He’s Han and Leia’s son.”

Oh.

Finn pinches himself to make sure he’s not in some lightning-induced fever dream. 

He’s not.

He glances at Kira.

Kira is staring off into the middle distance, her face expressionless as she bites her lower lip over and over and over again. He finds that oddly gutting. She’d bit her lip right before she’d kissed him that first time.

He looks away from her to Kylo Ren. Kylo Ren’s gaze flickers to him. It’s different when he’s not wearing a mask—when _both_ of them aren’t wearing masks. 

Somehow, Finn isn’t afraid of either of them. 

“Snoke ordered me to find Luke and kill him,” Kylo says, his gaze leaving Finn and returning to his mother, “A task I was fairly eager to complete. And he ordered Kira to pretend to be Rey, infiltrate the Resistance, and kill you.” Everyone’s eyes are on Kira now. Kira doesn’t look embarrassed, she doesn’t look afraid. She still has that blank, detached look on her face, but she’s stopped chewing her lip. _Does she feel anything at all? _Finn wonders angrily. _Or is she just some automaton?_ “We both seem to have been unsuccessful in our missions.”

“And why are you here, then? To save Kira from…From Snoke?”

“From Palpatine,” Kylo Ren says calmly. Kira inhales sharply at the same time that Leia goes very still and Luke says, “What?” very sharply.

“Palpatine?” Leia asks, confusion dripping off every syllable, but Kylo’s eyes are on Kira.

“Yeah, Veesh was apparently Palpatine’s clone.”

For a long moment, no one says anything. Then Kira rolls her eyes. “Sheev became Veesh? Very clever. Utter genius.” It’s the first sign of anything close to emotion that Finn has seen on her face since he’d refused to take her hand.

“I didn’t pick up on it. Did you? What does that make us?” Kylo asks, but Kira’s snorting. He turns back to his mother. “He was behind the rise of the First Order, apparently. He was very boastful about it all.”

“I would be too if I were him,” his mother says dryly. She leans her head back against the wall, looking up at the archways of the catacombs overhead. “He was her friend. Can you believe that? He was her friend and he tried to destroy her and her dream. But you can’t destroy hope, it turns out. You can try and try and try but it is far more resilient than it looks.”

She looks at Kylo. “You wanted to save Kira.”

“I wanted to save Kira.”

Next to him, Kira stirs a little uncomfortably as the General turns her gaze to her. “I take it because you couldn’t bring yourself to kill me?” Kira nods and Leia smiles. “That was brave of you.”

“Brave?” Kira asks.

“Yes. Not wanting to kill someone you’re ordered to kill, when you know the consequences—that’s bravery.” Poe had said something similar and Finn can’t help it, he looks at Kylo.

Kylo is watching him steadily. He blinks once or twice, as though considering. Then he lets out a slow exhale. 

_Were you being brave? _Finn wonders. It hadn’t felt like that when Kylo Ren had stared at him across the flames. It hadn’t even felt like a mercy. It had felt foreboding, as though it could and would be used to destroy him later if he did it again. It had never occurred to him that Kylo might have been defying orders to spare his life too. Orders unstated, perhaps, but the backbone of the First Order: we do what we want with your life and if you cannot be a cog in our machine we replace you.

Rey was defending him.

He had saved Finn’s life.

He had tried to save all of them.

He’d wanted to save Kira from whatever fate awaited her.

Grudgingly, he considered he might have to reconsider his stance on Kylo Ren. Not immediately, and not completely, but at least a little bit. At some point. Which can only mean…

He looks at Kira.

Her eyes are on him and this time—this time there is a flicker of emotion there. She bites her lip nervously.

“I’m not sure it was bravery,” Kira says, and is he imagining it or is there a hint of pleading there? “I was lying, and wasn’t sure how I could escape. I’d call it tactics.”

“But you came to find us when he had us,” Rose says quietly, her jaw jutting out. “You didn’t have to do that. He used us as bait to get you—that meant something, right?” Her voice cracks as she asks the question, crackles sort of like the lightning.

Finn finds Rose’s hand and squeezes it. 

Kira’s face is smooth as a mask, and Kylo murmurs, “Search your feelings. The truth is there.”

She glares at him. “You don’t know what I’m feeling.”

“No, but you’re hyperventilating.”

“Doesn’t someone have to be breathing really hard to be hyperventilating? Isn’t that the point of the word hyperventilating?” she snaps, rounding on him.

“Fine. You’re panicking. Search your feelings. You know the truth is there. You can say it.”

“Can I?” She looks suddenly frightened, so much younger than she is. 

“What damage will it do?”

She lets out a hollow laugh. “Only everything I—”

And suddenly she’s on her feet, hurrying from the room the way she’d run when he’d said they weren’t together after Tallie had thought they were, running from her feelings, and Kylo’s on his feet too, following her out, leaving the rest of them in their wake. 

Finn glances at Rose. Rose is staring at the door Kira had left through. Then she looks at Finn, biting her lip.

“You both need to go to the medical wing,” Poe says, speaking for the first time since they’d all gotten below ground. “You’ve been through a lot.”

“I—” Finn begins but Rose is already standing. Her hand is still in his and she’s leading him through the catacombs again. 

“She lied to us,” Rose says, softly enough that her voice doesn’t carry across the stones. 

“Yeah.” Finn’s voice sounds hollow, even to his own ears. Oddly, though, Rey hadn’t seemed angry that Kira had pretended to be her. That hurts worse than what Kira’s lie, somehow. Shouldn’t she be angry? Shouldn’t she feel betrayed? Or had she been all right with it all along? Had she not cared because she’d never met Leia Organa, had never gotten herself fully embroiled in the Resistance, beyond trying to deliver BB-8 to D’Qar?

“Is it strange that I don’t care?” Rose asks. “Because—because she seemed as though she ended up siding with us? She was sent here to destroy us but didn’t and—”

“She grew a conscience?” Finn asks.

“No—she had one the whole time, but she wasn’t allowed to use it. I believe that.” She gives him a significant look. “You know that feeling, right?” He swallows. Rose presses on. “It didn’t all feel like a lie,” Rose sounds insistent. Then she sighs. “Or maybe I’m just in denial. Maybe I just wanted her to care about us. But she did come after us when Veesh—Palpatine—had us.”

Right?

Finn pauses. 

She had come after them, she hadn’t wanted her colleague in arms to hurt them. She _hadn’t_ killed General Organa despite her orders. She’d kissed him, and held his hand, and let him comfort her.

How much of that all had been a lie? How much of it had been her pretending to be Rey, and how much of it had been herself?

And as easy as it would be to just spin himself in circles, revisit each and every interaction he’d had with her since Starkiller Base, he won’t know the truth of anything until he talks to her.

“We should find her,” he says.

Rose nods, her face determined.

“The medical wing can wait. We’re alive, right?” 

“Yeah, we’re alive.”

Rose’s hand is still in Finn’s as they turn back in the other direction, going to find Kira.

**Kira**

“Kira,” Kylo calls as he follows her down deeper underground. He’s faster than he looks. He has always looked like he should be slow—a great hulk of a man, a powerhouse, not built for agility, but he has always been able to cover distance more quickly than her because his legs are so damn long and it’s not long before his hand clamps around her arm and she whirls around.

There are tears on her face and he tries pulling her into that awkward hug again, the one from before when they’d been in the park. There’s still blood on her face, she thinks, because it comes away on her hands—freshly wet from her tears—as she tries to rub the tears away.

“Stop it,” she mutters and he steps back at once. “I don’t—Just let me—”

“No,” Kylo says. “No, I won’t let you.”

“You don’t even know what I was going to—”

“Let you be? Leave you alone? No. Not now. Stop it.” He rests both hands on her shoulders and presses down and it takes her a moment before she realizes he’s trying to make her sit on the ground. She does.

The ground is better than a chair, somehow. She breathes. 

“The war isn’t over,” she tells him dully. “Hux is still out there. And Canady. And all the rest.”

“Yeah,” he says. “Do you want to go back to it?”

Kira looks at him. “Do you?”

He barks out a dry laugh. “And take orders from Hux? Never. Besides. Who would train us? We could be our own masters now, Kira.”

She feels like a little girl again. The world doesn’t make sense, but there’s Ben Solo sitting across from her, keeping her from feeling alone.

“What do you want?” he asks her quietly. “Let’s start there.”

“What do _you_ want?” she snaps back at him. “I follow you, remember?”

“And I don’t know what I want, so let’s work on you for a change. What do you want?”

She sits there staring at him, her mind blank with terror—far more frightened than she’d felt at any point today. “I don’t know,” she whispers.

“You do.”

“I _don’t_.”

“Kira, you’re a good liar but you’re lying to yourself right now. Stop it.”

“I want my parents never to have left her behind!” she bursts out angrily, tears streaming down her face. “I want my parents never to have left _me_ behind. There? You happy? I want things I can’t change because they’re in the past. I want her not to look at me like I’m a monster because—because—I didn’t want to leave her behind.”

Somewhere during the outburst, her forehead ends up pressed to Kylo’s collarbone and he’s rubbing her back. “I want family,” she moans. “I want friends. I want all these things that I can’t have.”

“Why not? Why can’t you have them?”

“Because that would mean leaving you behind. And you’re my brother, Ben. I’m not leaving you behind.”

“You think you can’t have the friends you’ve made because of me?” he repeats, sounding a bit dazed, a bit distant. She thinks of Finn and Rose, Poe and the squadron. She thinks even of his mother calling her sweetheart like she matters, like she’s cared for. 

“You won’t want to stay.”

“I don’t know what I want,” Kylo says. “But maybe it’s time for me to follow you somewhere, instead of the other way around. My way ended up with you nearly dead.”

She looks up at him, pulling back, her eyes narrowing.

“You,” she begins slowly, “You…you’re trying to find an excuse to stay.”

“What? No I’m not,” he says far too quickly and Kira bursts out laughing.

“You’re the worst liar I’ve ever met, Ben Solo.”

He tilts his head back against the wall of the catacomb, much the way his mother had done in the room. “Yeah,” he agrees. “Fine. I don’t know what to do, you happy? I’ve been a complete mess for the past few weeks.”

“Same,” Kira sighs.

“I don’t know what I want for myself,” he says slowly. “But I want you to be safe, I want Rey to be safe, I want my mother and father to be safe.”

“That sounds like you know what you want,” Kira points out dryly.

“Oh yeah?” he snaps back. “What do I want for myself?”

“Peace,” Kira replies simply. “You want peace. You can’t have that until all those things are in place.”

He swallows. 

“What if I don’t get it?” he asks her, and now he is the one that sounds like the frightened child. “What if it keeps on going, forever and ever. What if it wasn’t just Palpatine and Snoke preying on me and trying to turn me into their hellhound? What if it’s me that’s…” He sighs. “I suppose I won’t know for a while, will I? Because this is the first time…” He runs his hand over his head, through his hair, looking suddenly dazed. “This is the first time I won’t have anyone digging around in my head.”

Then he sighs and lets out a long groan. “I was just a pawn the whole time, wasn’t I? From the second I was born, just part of Palpatine’s grand…”

“We all were,” Kira says quietly. 

He looks at her for a long moment. His hand twitches, as though he wants to take hers but thinks better of it because that’s not a thing they do. Instead he swallows. “Yeah,” he whispers. “You were too. We all were.” He gets to his feet. “I need to…I need to talk to them.” And she knows he means his family. His real family. Not her. 

But he’d come after her first.

He looks down at her. “You seem calmer.”

“Yeah,” she says. She is. She thinks she is, anyway. Maybe because it feels like things might…like they’…be ok. Whatever ok means. She doesn’t know. Like she won’t have to leave behind the things she loves. He nods and makes to go. “Ben?”

“Yeah?”

“I didn’t want to kill your mom.”

Ben gives her a funny look. “We found your mom,” he says quietly. “Me and Rey. In the unknown regions. And I can’t say I’d say the same.”

“You—” Kira’s throat goes dry.

Ben nods. “Ask her about it. It’s hers to tell.” And he’s gone.

Kira sits there, breathing, just breathing, for a few more minutes before she hears footsteps.

“Hey.”

It’s Rose standing over her. 

“Hi,” Kira replies. Rose kneels down and sits on her calves while Finn crouches down in a squat. “You can sit, you know,” she says.

Finn does, resting his arms on his bent knees. 

“Sorry about lying to you,” Kira says at last. “It was orders, and if it’s any consolation, I completely failed at them.”

“Yeah, seems like it,” Finn says slowly. He’s watching her closely, guardedly. She doesn’t like that he’s guarded around her. She doesn’t want him to be guarded around her.

She wants him to hold her hand, and look at her the way he did when she was Rey.

Because he’d loved Rey. He’d loved her, not Kira.

She gives him a sad smile. “If it’s any consolation, I tried not to fuck up what you and Rey could have.”

Finn makes a face she doesn’t understand. His lips get tight, his eyes get oddly sad an when he speaks, his voice is heavy. “I don’t know what me and Rey could have,” he says slowly. “I’d known her for about two days before you swapped places, and now she’s just been off on a road trip with your pal Kylo.”

“Oh.” 

She feels that same panic filling her, the one that had made her run, the one that had made Kylo sprint after her and sit her down, the way he so frequently did, the one that makes her feel like everything is falling apart again. “Well,” she says. “Sorry, then. I probably shouldn’t have…I probably made that worse.”

Finn takes a slow breath. He’s still watching her closely. _No_ one has ever looked at her that closely. Not Luke, not Snoke. _Maybe_ Ben, but Ben had never needed to look at her that closely to get a read on her—a benefit of having known her since she was six.

“Not really,” he says, looking at her. “Or at least…”

And she sees the question in his eyes, recognizes it before he says more and there it is again, that paralyzing fear. She feels her cheeks heat, feels her heart throb and she takes Finn’s hand and squeezes it. He looks down at it and swallows. Then he squeezes back.

“I don’t know what to make of all this,” he tells her quietly. “You are a Knight of Ren,” he begins and Kira cuts him off.

“_Were_ a Knight of Ren,” she says. “I don’t know what I am anymore.”

She notices it—the way Finn’s breath catches, the way his hand tightens—not enough to be a full on squeeze but definitely tightens—in hers. 

“I—” she starts and she looks at Rose who is sitting there, her arms wrapped around her legs. “I—I am not really built for this. I’m not good at any of it. This whole…feelings thing.”

Rose gives her a wry smile. “I think you’re better at it than you think you are.”

“Yeah?” That catches her off guard. 

Rose nods. “You trusted your feelings and didn’t do what you were supposed to, right?”

“I meant—”

“I know what you meant,” Rose says. “So what are you feeling now? About this. About us?”

Kira swallows and to her surprise, Finn does too.

Rose rolls her eyes. “Oh you both are so—” she lets out a huff of annoyance and rolls forward onto her knees again. She leans in and gives Finn a kiss, and then gives Kira a kiss, and then says, “I don’t see why it has to be a binary. Especially when you’re both too confused and honestly too confusing.” She looks Kira dead in the eyes. “I sort of have a crush on you, you know. And if you weren’t pretending to be all of what I liked, and if you _did_ sort of abandon your duties because you knew it was wrong, then I don’t see why that has to change. And you—” she turns to Finn and her blush only gets deeper. “Well…you’re cute.”

“Cute?”

“Yeah. Cute,” Kira agrees and Finn stares between both of them. 

Then Kira starts to laugh, and god, it feels good to laugh.

That’s how Rey finds them, creeping through the darkness, tentative as she rounds the corner. Just sitting on the floor, laughing. For a moment, it looks like she’s going to try and slip away unnoticed, but Kira is on her feet. “I’ll be back later,” she tells the other two and she goes towards her sister.

Her sister, who’s dressed in her blacks, and who looks every bit as anxious as Kira had just stopped feeling.

“Hi,” she says carefully.

“Hi,” Kira replies. She takes a deep breath. “Thanks. Thanks for—for saving me.”

“You didn’t need saving,” Rey points out.

“Yeah, but neither of us knew that.”

Rey flushes a little bit. 

“Kylo—Ben—he said you saw mom.”

Rey’s face splits into a mask of sadness. “She wanted me to kill her.”

“Did you?” Kira asks. Rey shakes her head. _I would have, _Kira doesn’t say. 

“I think it was worse, leaving her alive. She…” Rey swallows. “She wasn’t well. Like something in her was broken. I don’t know if it was always like that. I don’t remember.”

“You didn’t want to help her?” Kira asks. 

“She didn’t want my help. She didn’t want me.”

The words hang in the air. 

“I do,” Kira says quietly. “I always did. It hurt so badly, losing you.” And there are tears on her dumb face again and unlike when Ben tried to hug her, it’s not awkward at all when Rey puts her arms around Kira and lets her cry into her shoulder. “And I don’t really know you,” she continues, snuffling a little. “I’d like to, though. I feel like it’ll help me know myself. And I want that.” She gulps and pulls away.

There are tears in Rey’s eyes too as she nods and takes both of Kira’s hands. She doesn’t say a damn word, she just squeezes, and Kira feels like something has expanded in her chest, like something has gone right for the first time since she was six.

“I’m sorry,” she says, “About when we first kidnapped you and sort of—”

“No, it’s fine. It was jarring. I’d forgotten you too.”

“Yeah,” Kira says. She has to wipe snot from her nose, but Rey’s still holding her hand and she doesn’t want to let go. 

“It was easier, I think,” Rey says and her voice is so sad. She takes a deep breath. “Anyway—I’d rather focus on the future than the past. We’ve found each other again, and that’s what matters.”

“Yeah,” Kira agrees. Then a smile—an honest to goodness smile—spreads across her face, wider than any smile she’s ever smiled. And she gives Rey another hug and she feels whole.

**Kylo**

He returns to the room only to find it empty. His mother, his father, his uncle—they’ve gone. Aunt Amilyn and the commander who was there with her are both gone too.

Ben closes the door behind him and settles down in the chair that he’d been sitting in when first he’d come through. He closes his eyes. He reaches out with the Force.

They’re not far. They’ve gone to get things to eat, if he had to guess, based on the proximity of other life forms. Or maybe they’re strategizing what to do with the corpses they’d brought underground.

Kira’s right. The war’s not over. Not just yet. But his mother will know that and already have taken it into account. She was still fighting the Empire long after the destruction of the second Death Star. And when the unexpected seeds that Palpatine had lain had taken root, she’d warred with the saplings.

The door opens and his mother comes inside. She’s alone this time. His father is with Luke still, both hanging back, waiting. 

His mother sits next to him and he can tell she’s nervous.

“Luke told us,” she says quietly. “About—about what he did. Ben, sweetheart. I’m so, so sorry.”

Ben opens his eyes and looks at his mother out of the corner of them. 

“I know he feels a tremendous amount of guilt.”

“He should,” Ben growls.

“I know,” Leia says and she takes his hand. “And—and you get to decide what that means to you. Just like I get to decide what it means to me.” Does he imagine it, or is there a tinge of fury there in her words, disappointment, frustration. But no—no she wouldn’t think that about Luke, and certainly not on his behalf. 

“You just gave me away,” he says.

“We were trying to help,” she tells him at once. “I don’t know how much you remember, Ben, but you were unable to control it, control yourself. The nightmares, they—” she pauses. “I always thought I was imagining it—that I felt something dark watching me when I was pregnant with you. But after what Rey told us, and you told us—I am sure I was right.” She lets out a shuddering, tearless sob and lifts Ben’s hand to her lips. “Ben, I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what I can do to make it all not have happened the way it did. You’re not my little boy anymore, but you’re still my son and I—”

_Don’t know what to say._

“Mom?”

“Yes?” A little bit gasped, a little bit nervous.

“I don’t know what I want to hear. So we’re a good match.”

It takes her a moment before she lets out a little laugh. “All right then,” she says. 

“I’m sticking around for a while. Kira wants to, and I don’t have anywhere else to go.”

“You always have a place with us, Ben. You know that.”

That, finally, is when he opens his eyes. “Really? The Jedi Killer?” 

His mother’s face freezes, her breath catches in her throat. 

“The Jedi Killer who saved us all from the Empire again,” she says slowly. “I may never forgive Vader for what he did—to me, to the galaxy, to my family—but your uncle did. I don’t see why I can’t forgive you for that.”

“They were innocent children, mom,” he says. _I trained alongside them. I still see their faces. _“I should be tried for murder. For them and everyone else I’ve killed.”

“Is that what you want?” she asks quietly.

Ben looks at her. “I don’t know what I want. I just don’t think there’s justice in the galaxy, and I’m not sure there ever has been. I want to be more than that, but I’m not sure I can be.”

“What prison will hold you? What banishment will contain you? Palpatine came back from the dead by clone and I don’t much fancy the idea of killing you,” she says sharply, and Ben sighs and leans his head back, closing his eyes. He’s tired. He just wants this to be over. He wants to—he doesn’t know. Nothing will bring them back. Nothing will mean he won’t have the memories of killing them.

“I don’t know, mom,” he says quietly. “But I should be punished for it, shouldn’t I? How can you claim the Republic is just if I’m not?”

“And Snoke wasn’t punishment enough for you?” she demands and Ben’s eyes snap open.

He’d been thrown off of cliffs, and electrified, and made to see things that weren’t there. He had been told he was weak for feeling guilt or compassion. He’d been transmogrified and brutalized to the point of not knowing who or what he was anymore. 

And how much of that had originated with his mother’s lie? If she had just told him the truth the whole time, then maybe none of this—maybe he never would have—

“Is he yours?” Ben asks quietly and his mother’s jaw sets. Then she exhales slowly, and nods. 

“Whatever you may think,” she begins shakily, “Whatever he may have led you to believe—I loved you, Ben. The last thing I wanted was for you to be taken from me, which is exactly what happened. Punishment for my sins, maybe. But whatever he did to you—was it punishment for yours?”

“He led me to want to destroy it all. He made me want—” his throat is too thick, though and he looks down at his hands now. The hands that had killed them all, that hadn’t shaken until he’d come across Kira.

“I don’t think there’s a punishment that the Republic could offer that would match that,” his mother says. “I wouldn’t want there to be. He was cruel, Ben. He tortured you. Let that be punishment enough.”

“And being complicit in the First Order?” he demands. “That came after, didn’t it? I ordered massacres. I tortured people. _Your _people. Poe Dameron.”

“Well, then we hit the same problem that no prison can hold you,” she says. “And that I don’t want your life. Or if I do—“ She cuts herself off and Ben’s skin goes cold. Is she really considering it? She wouldn’t, would she?

When she speaks again, it’s thoughtfully. “If you want to make up for what you’ve done, then atone for it. If Luke tried to kill you, his hand is involved—maybe you and he figure out what you can build together. If those students die, let their deaths not stand meaningless. You both have so much to teach.”

“How is that atoning for the First Order?” he asks.

“Why did you join the First Order?” Leia asks him. “Because Snoke wanted you to?”

“Give me some credit, mom, some of it was because I was mad at you,” he tells her with an eyeroll. “It was time to let old things die.”

“Yes,” his mother says dryly. “Let old things like Sheev Palpatine die.”

Ben gives her a look and she gives him one right back. 

“So again, let the punishment fit the crime. If you were part of the First Order to prove to your master that you could be his Darth Vader, that you could be the strongest user of the dark side of the force in a generation, then I think the right punishment for that crime is you working with your uncle to actually rebuild the destruction you wrought. Perhaps it’s not direct, but it’ll hit your heart and isn’t that what a good punishment should do? Fit the motivation?”

“Luke wants the Jedi Order to end, and I’m _not_ a Jedi,” Ben snaps.

“No, you’re not. So maybe it’s not a Jedi school. Maybe it’s something else. A different way of using the Force, of living lives. Something for a world we’re still trying to work out how to build, rather than the old bones of a fallen Republic.”

“As if you’re not trying to rebuild that fallen Republic.”

“You don’t think I’ve learned my lesson?” Leia says, her eyes flashing. “I have some ideas, Ben. I know how to iterate. It won’t be like last time. It’ll be stronger. It’ll be right.”

“Snoke said the same thing about the First Order,” he said, too tired to really care how the words sound.

“Well, why is he allowed to try iterating but I’m not?” his mother replies huffily.

Ben sighs.

“I don’t think anything’s going to be right,” he says. “I don’t—” he looks at his mother. He can’t remember the last time he’d told her the contents of his mind, his fears, his hopes, with the expectation that she’d support him. “I don’t know if anything is going to be right ever. But I’ll try that. So long as I don’t end up ripping Luke’s head off and end up on the run.”

His mother smiles. “Good,” she says. “Luke says that the ills of Darth Vader weren’t to be used to define Anakin Skywalker. I’d say the same of Kylo Ren and Ben Solo.”

“That’s…” it doesn’t really make sense, he thinks. But all the same, there’s a lump in his throat and his mom’s arm is around his shoulder now and he feels like a little boy, but in a good way. Taken care of. Appreciated, and seen, and loved. “Thanks, mom.”

**Rey**

She and Kira curl up in the same bunk that night, the way they did when they were small. It’s cramped, and Kira keeps kicking her in her sleep, but every time she does, Rey grins. Kira snores, which makes it hard to fall sleep, but she does fall asleep in the end because she wakes up to the sound of a knock on the door and Kira clambering out of the bed.

“Hey,” Kira says.

Ben replies. “Hey—I’m looking for Rey.” There’s a pause and then a muttered, “Shut up,” and a mild guffaw. 

“She’s asleep,” Kira says.

“Sort of,” Rey mumbles.

“Give her a bit,” Kira continues. The door closes and Rey tries to rouse herself.

She does, in the end, stumbling to the fresher. She takes a quick shower and before staring at the clothes that she and Kira traded days before. “Which do I…” she mumbles. Kira shrugs and Rey grabs the lighter clothes. The darks aren’t hers, even if she’d gotten used to them. 

She goes out into the main atrium and finds Ben sitting there. He’s wearing a white shirt and his same dark pants and his hair also looks like he’s been in the fresher. It’s damp and hangs around his face, curling gently.

He stands when he sees her approach.

“Hi,” she says a little breathlessly.

“Want to go for a walk?” he asks her.

“Sure.”

So they do, up through the catacombs and along one of the cliffsides until they reach the same little garden they’d been in the night before. It feels like a year before.

“Sorry we didn’t—I—” he begins cutting himself off. “Sorry I didn’t find you last night.”

“It’s all right,” she says at once. “I spent a lot of time with Kira. I needed that.”

“Yeah,” he says slowly, as though he hadn’t considered that and can’t tell if he’s relieved or—or something else. “Yeah.” 

“Are you all right?” she asks him right as he makes to look away across the hedges. She reaches a hand up and cups his chin and he goes so very still. 

And suddenly his lips are on hers, overpowering and needy. His arms are pulling her against his chest and his teeth are nipping at her lips and Rey melts into him. Her arms twine around his neck and her hands make a mess of his freshly washed hair. She’s standing on the tips of her toes and he’s holding her up, keeping her from falling and the air is a soft sort of warm around them in the early morning light.

When he pulls away, she is breathless, her heart hammering in her chest as though she’s run a mile. “I’m ok,” he says. “Are you?”

“I’m great,” she replies breathily. She licks her lips. “I’m—”

They end up in the grass under a tree, his hand up her shirt, his groin pressing against her hip, and Rey feels too good for this to be real, which is why she’s unsurprised when he stops. It was too good to continue, after all. 

“Thank you,” he whispers to her.

“What for?”

“Believing in me. I hadn’t realized that I’d stopped believing in myself until you refused to give up on me.” He kisses her again and she puts every gentle thought she can muster into that kiss. She’s never kissed anyone before Ben. She doesn’t actually think she’s very good at it, but he doesn’t seem to mind. Maybe she’s getting better. She sort of thinks she’s getting better. She’s always been good at drilling herself to perfection, after all.

“Thanks,” she tells him when they break apart next.

“What for?”

_Making me feel like I matter. Looking at me like you’re looking at me now. Being here with me and making sure I know that you would come back for me. _“Keeping Kira safe.”

They kiss, and kiss, and kiss until a mildly scandalized Nabooan finds them and tells them that that sort of fraternization is to be done in _private spaces_, which makes them both laugh and go off to find a private space.

He keeps pulling her close to him as they walk, and he looks so much younger, so much more carefree when he smiles down at her. 

“You’re staying?” she asks him. “With the Resistance.”

“Yeah,” he says. “With Kira, mostly, so if she’s with the Resistance then I’m here too.”

“Good,” Rey says. Because Kira and she—they’ve just found one another again. They aren’t going to leave one another’s sides for a while. Which means he’s here. He’ll be here with her. She kisses him again. She likes kissing him. She really thinks she’s getting better at it. This time, he makes a little noise in the back of his throat as she swipes her tongue across his lips. “I want to stay here with you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi Friends,
> 
> Thanks so much for reading along! When I started writing this in April, my goal was to have it up and completed before TROS and here we are...kinda.
> 
> Kinda: because I had planned an epilogue, but haven't written it yet. I hope to, but I also am not sure I will, based solely on the fact that this draft has been ready for months now and I haven't gotten to it. I'll continue to live in hope, but for the meanwhile, I'm marking it complete, because I'd hate to leave it incomplete when it's waiting for a single POV epilogue. 
> 
> Thanks so much for joining me in all this and ENJOY TROS!!

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you're enjoying! You can find me [here!](http://linktr.ee/crossingwinter)


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